Casting Call [1] – The Sky is Everywhere

Welcome to the very first ever edition of Casting Call, hosted by Tee @ YA Crush, Sandie @ Teen Lit Rocks, Candice @ The Grown-Up YA, Dixie & Maggie @ Gone Pecan, and of course, me too! Each Friday we’ll take a couple characters from our favorite books and discuss who we’d think would be perfect for the roles! And of course this gives us the opportunity as well to rehash our favorite parts of the story and swoon over all those dream literary crushes of ours.

First up this week, we’re casting for The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson! If you haven’t read the book, here’s a quick summary from Goodreads and a link to my original review:

Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker, bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet and spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery older sister, Bailey. But when Bailey dies abruptly, Lennie is catapulted to center stage of her own life – and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, suddenly finds herself struggling to balance two. Toby was Bailey’s boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie’s own. Joe is the new boy in town, a transplant from Paris whose nearly magical grin is matched only by his musical talent. For Lennie, they’re the sun and the moon; one boy takes her out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But just like their celestial counterparts, they can’t collide without the whole wide world exploding.

My original review: The Sky is Everywhere

This week, we will be casting Lennie, Joe, and Toby and I had a specific picture in my mind for Lennie’s Uncle Big so I decided to cast him as well! Here are my choices:

Shailene Woodley as Lennie Walker

Lennie: This one was really hard for me. Who was my Lennie? I knew I was looking for a brunette (was Lennie even a brunette? I tend to use the character descriptions as guidelines sometimes. Sorry, authors), and I went back and forth on a lot of girls – I almost chose Kalia Prescott from The Hunger Games (District 3 female tribute, although I don’t actually remember seeing her in the movie) but if I’m correct, I think she was a model-turned-actress and I really needed my Lennie to be a bit more simple. Someone who had a more natural look and who could maybe fit the personality. Although I haven’t actually seen anything Shailene Woodley is actually in, I really like her look for Lennie and I’d hope she could pull off the roll! 

Justin Grant Wade as Joe

Joe: I don’t know why – I think maybe there was a mention of Joe wearing a Letterman jacket early on or something? – but for some reason I got this picture of Steve Holt (Steve Holt aka Justin Grant Wade from Arrested Development… Yeah, I don’t know) stuck in my brain and that was how I pictured Joe the whole time. I’m really not sure how that happened, but it did.Toby: The name Toby really doesn’t help me picture anyone good for this role (Toby is a horribly dorky name in my opinion (Sorry to any Tobys out there)) and to be honest, I kind of hated him for a long time in the book so I really didn’t want to picture him as anyone nice. I thought about this one for a long time and I finally came up with Matt Lauria from Friday Night Lights. To me, he’s somewhere in between a little dorky looking with the potential to look really nice, so I chose him as my Toby. Plus, I think he looks like the opposite of Justin Grant Wade which in one of my favorite quotes from the book, Lennie compares the two as opposites.

Jeffrey Jones as Uncle Big

Uncle Big: Again, this is another time that I’m not quite sure if I pictured it accurately from the character description in the book, but once I heard that Uncle Big had a big mustache, I immediately had a picture in my mind of someone (which I now think MAY be a cartoon character because it’s SO specific in my mind I cannot find the actor who actually looks like this) who has red hair, tall, built, and has a big burly mustache. I searched and searched to try to find who this guy was in my mind and I found nothing. So I did the second best thing and found someone to kind of look like that picture and that turns out to be present-day Jeffrey Jones (aka Mr. Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). A little bit scary, I know, and Uncle Big in my mind looked totally sweet and not creepy (like this picture), but it was the closest I could find LOL.

Now I want to hear your thoughts!
This week we each did a full cast for the book to help our special kick-off for Casting Call. Next week, we’re making you work for it! We’re splitting up the casting between us all for more of a “hop” between our blogs – Visit each one to get a full feel our our ideal cast!!

Do you agree with my choices? Who would you have put in these roles? And as for every week, be sure to check out everyone else’s choices! Catch who they picked and show them some comment love too!

Sandie @ Teen Lit Rocks
Candice @ The Grown-Up YA
Tee @ YA Crush
Maggie @ Gone Pecan

And don’t miss us next Friday when we cast the popular dystopian DIVERGENT by VERONICA ROTH!

*Disclaimer: In our development of this feature, we discovered that the book blog Lit Snit featured “Casting Call Fridays” back in 2010. Our Casting Call feature is in no way purposefully copying or stealing this idea and any similarities in  format, casting choices, etc are purely coincidental.