Book Name: The Shape of Water
Authors: Guillermo Del Toro and Daniel Kraus
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Rating: 4.5/5
Book Blurb: The most celebrated movie of the year is now the must-read novel of 2018. “[A] phenomenally enrapturing and reverberating work of art in its own right..[that] vividly illuminates the minds of the characters, greatly enhancing our understanding of their temperaments and predicaments and providing more expansive and involving story lines.” ―Booklist
Visionary storyteller Guillermo del Toro and celebrated author Daniel Kraus combine their estimable talent in this haunting, heart-breaking love story.
It is 1962 and Elisa Esposito―mute her whole life, orphaned as a child―is struggling with her humdrum existence as a janitor working the graveyard shift at Baltimore’s Occam Aerospace Research Center. Were it not for Zelda, a protective co-worker and Giles, her loving neighbour, she doesn’t know how she’d make it through the day.
Then, one fateful night, she sees something she was never meant to see, the Center’s most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man, captured in the Amazon, to be studied for Cold War advancements. The creature is terrifying but also magnificent, capable of language and of understanding emotions…and Elisa can’t keep away. Using sign language, the two learn to communicate. Soon, affection turns into love and the creature becomes Elisa’s sole reason to live.
But outside forces are pressing in. Richard Strickland, the obsessed soldier who tracked the asset through the Amazon, wants nothing more than to dissect it before the Russians get a chance to steal it. Elisa has no choice but to risk everything to save her beloved. With the help of Zelda and Giles, Elisa hatches a plan to break out the creature. But Strickland is on to them. And the Russians are, indeed, coming.
Developed from the ground up as a bold two-tiered release―one story interpreted by two artists in the independent mediums of literature and film―The Shape of Water is unlike anything you’ve ever read or seen.
“Most movie novelizations do little more than write down what audiences see on the screen. But the novel that’s accompanying Guillermo del Toro’s new movie The Shape of Water is no mere adaptation. Co-author Daniel Kraus’ book and the film tell the same story, of a mute woman who falls in love with an imprisoned and equally mute creature, in two very different ways.” ―io9
Praise for The Shape of Water directed by Guillermo del Toro
Winner of the 2018 Golden Globe Award for Best Director of a Motion Picture
“With encouragement from critics and awards voters, discerning viewers should make Fox Searchlight’s December release the season’s classiest date movie―for perhaps the greatest of The Shape of Water’s many surprises is how extravagantly romantic it is.” ―Variety
“It is never less than magnificent.” ―The Daily Beast
“A visually and emotionally ravishing fantasy that should find a welcome embrace from audiences starved for imaginative escape.” ―The Hollywood Reporter
Awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film at the74th Annual Venice International Film Festival
Review: Guillermo Del Toro’s dramatization, The Shape of Water, took many awards home. Among other enormous honors, the 2017 film won four Academy awards, including best picture.
Fine exhibitions, shocking visuals, a winning foundation score, and an enrapturing and abnormal romantic tale – the film has a considerable measure to suggest for itself.
Set in America of the 1960s, the story takes after Elisa, a quiet janitor working at an administration inquire about focus in Baltimore, who experiences passionate feelings for a land and/or water capable man detained and being tormented at the lab. At the point when the military chooses to kill and dismember him for space explore, Elisa with some assistance from her companions Giles and Zelda plans a self-destructive protect.
Toro teamed up with writer Daniel Kraus to re-recount his account of recondite love through the novel frame, and the resulting book, distributed in March, grows and advances the gossamer strands of the first.
The Shape of Water isn’t only a sentimental love story, it is also the story where unlikely characters take precedence and later triumph. They manage to survive the pitilessness of this world, discover reason in it and hazard everything to beat its capable creatures.
If you’ve watched the film already, it would be a good idea to read the novel as there are some additional plot points not covered in the film. It’s like reliving the experience twice and when the script is so powerful, it can be read again and again.