Children's Books on the Big Screen : University Press of Mississippi : 9781496828651 : 1496828658 : 30 Jun 2020 : In Children's Books on the Big Screen, author Meghann Meeusen goes beyond the traditional adaptation approach of comparing and contrasting the similarities of film and book versions of a text. By tracing a pattern across films for young viewers, Meeusen proposes a consistent trend can be found in movies adapted from children's and young adult books: that representations of binaries such as male/female, self/other, and adult/child become more strongly contrasted and more diametrically opposed in the film versions. The book describes this as binary polarization, suggesting that starker opposition between concepts leads to shifts in the messages that texts send, particularly when it comes to representations of gender, race, and childhood. After introducing why critics need a new way of thinking about children's adapted texts, Children's Books on the Big Screen uses middle-grad