Kes and Billy Elliott

A comparison between Billy Elliot and A kestrel for a knave (the film and the book)


To be honest I don’t find this particular genre very interesting. The book was one of the most boring books i've ever read; it had no sense of excitement or suspense and could easily have been classed as a biography of an ordinary boy’s life in the 1960s. The film was slightly better, but this is due to the fact, that it was designed to appeal to a modern audience; the ending was excruciantly perfect and definitely would not have happened had Billy Elliot been real.
Both the film and the book are about a boy called Billy. In the film the boy is called Billy Elliot, he’s younger than Billy Casper (the boy in the book), being eleven whereas Casper is between the ages fourteen and fifteen. Both the film and the book are set in mining communities with members of each boy’s families working down the pits, in Elliot’s family it’s his dad and brother and in Casper’s his brother. However...