It never ceases to amaze me that some of the very best books out there never seem to get made into movies.

I’ve written before about the non-fiction story, THE UPSTAIRS ROOM, by Johanna Reiss.  That book about a child saved from the Nazis by decent farmers in Holland has been crying out to be a movie since the early 1970s and some studio somewhere is going to realize it one day and make a mint.

Another is MANDY, written by actress Julie Andrews.  My grandfather bought it for me in 1974, and reading it, at age 13, was one of the finest highlights of my whole year.

It took a long while for Grandpop to find it.  My cousin Theresa wanted a copy, so he decided to get one for each of us, but he could not find the book anywhere.  Initially we all thought it strange that a book by someone as well-known as Julie Andrews wasn’t more easily located.  The problem turned out to be that Julie Andrews wrote it under her legal married name, Julie Edwards.  Naturally, once Grandpop figured that out, he bought the books.

MANDY is a beautiful story.  It’s about a little orphan girl in England who is sort of an Annie without a Miss Hannigan, a gutsy kid who doesn’t have a home, and at least this one isn’t in the hands of  a shrew who’s running her orphanage.  The matron running the establishment where Mandy lives is a decent woman.

One day Mandy finds a fantastic abandoned cottage in the woods.  The walls inside are covered with seashells.  It’s spectacular.  The child decides to plant some flowers outside of it to try to make it her own…

I’ll stop there and won’t throw in any spoilers, except to say the book is full of realistic, pleasant surprises.  Just when you think it’s going in one direction, it surprises you with another.  Then it changes course again, and yet again.  As for the ending, well, all I will clue you in on is that I have never sobbed with joy so much, before or since, while reading any book by anybody, as I did when I came to the ultimate surprise in the second-to-last chapter of MANDY.  In fact, I still tear up whenever I see it in a bookstore and re-read that phenomenal chapter.  Julie Andrews Edwards, BRAVA!

The story is timeless, not to mention wholesome, and in this age of non-stop Hollywood violence and stories of creeps like Harvey Weinstein, some wholesome fare would be great.  The characters are believable.  It’s still in print after all these decades, which says plenty.  So why isn’t Hollywood paying the story some positive and long overdue attention?

What the world needs now is a nice movie called MANDY!  And another one called THE UPSTAIRS ROOM, too.