My Fault and its adaptations

A comparison of Mercedes Ron’s novel My Fault and its adaptations, Culpa mía and My Fault: London

There are some stories you consume because they are beautifully written, carefully constructed and filled with characters making thoughtful, emotionally mature decisions.

And then there is My Fault.

Mercedes Ron’s novel is an absolute train wreck. I mean that with a strange amount of affection, because I read the entire thing in roughly 48 hours while repeatedly thinking, No. Absolutely not. What are you PEOPLE DOING? I gave it two stars. I also immediately understood why it became a terrifyingly successful phenomenon. Much like the After series.

Then I decided to watch both of Amazon’s film adaptations (yes, BOTH) and accepted that I will absolutely read the sequel. Not because I thought the book was particularly good, but because I need to know what happens next. (And because Ruby and I are buddy reading the series. And gosh darn do I need a buddy while I’m reading this.)

The appeal of a beautiful train wreck

But this is the magic of a lot of poorly written books. I could name a few… *cough* FBAA *cough* They are chaotic, action-heavy, melodramatic, and compulsively readable.

This one, specifically, has strong fanfiction energy, with more than a hint of the Twilight-to-Fifty Shades pipeline, and enough terrible decisions by the two MCs to sustain an entire trilogy. It is also a fascinating story to compare across formats, because the two films solve very different problems, despite having the same story baseline.

The Spanish adaptation, Culpa mía, stays closer to the novel and better preserves the contrast between the characters we first meet and the people they become together. I also think the cast look closer to how the novels describe them.

My Fault: London changes more, especially the location (yes, even from the translated novel), and the entire personality of Noah, but is a slicker and more effective film. In fact, London may work better precisely because the story moves too quickly for the audience to stop and ask why Noah’s latest decision is such a spectacularly terrible idea.

So, which version gets the original story right? Annoyingly, the answer depends on whether we mean the characters, the plot or the experience of being swept into the chaos.

A warning before we continue: there are spoilers for Mercedes Ron’s My Fault, the Spanish film Culpa mía and My Fault: London below.

My Fault — the translated book

Now, I haven’t read the original text (given that I don’t speak Spanish), so I’m going off Ruby’s advice here that the English translation is pretty bang on. Which is simultaneously good to know, and also terrifying.

The basic premise of the story is engineered for conflict. Noah is forced to leave behind her old life in Canada when her mother marries a wealthy man in LA, moving her into an unfamiliar world of enormous houses, expensive cars and a new stepbrother who is both infuriating and, inconveniently, extremely attractive.

Nick appears to embody everything Noah distrusts about her new life. He is arrogant, secretive and involved in a dangerous world of illegal street racing and fighting.

Naturally, the two of them develop obsessive feelings for each other. After the obligatory “you are my enemy” discussion.

More time means more questions

The book has one significant advantage over either film: time. We spend longer inside Noah’s circumstances, understand more of what she has left behind and see more clearly how her past affects her reactions. The former best friend and ex-boyfriend material complicates her departure, while the threatening letters she is receiving keep pressure on her even before the central danger fully emerges.

Those details make her feel less like a goody two-shoes straight-A student who simply chooses chaos as soon as she hits the US, and more like someone whose supposedly safe old life was already cracking beneath her.

Unfortunately, time is also the book’s greatest enemy. (That and language, but we will come to that!)

Because the novel gives each development room to breathe, it also gives the reader room to examine it. And once you begin examining the decisions in My Fault, the entire structure starts waving about 500 red flags and sending up flares.

Noah is supposed to be an intelligent high school senior who has lived through severe trauma. She recognises danger, and then proceeds to run directly towards it. She does not pass GO or collect her $200.

Nick is in his twenties and has also been through his own trauma. He knows he should keep his distance, and then absolutely does not.

The adults (Noah’s mum and Nick’s dad) make rules with the belief that saying something once constitutes actual supervision of a minor who has had her life threatened in the past.

Every new revelation should inspire several honest conversations, and maybe some professional intervention. Instead, it inspires another secret, another confrontation, or another car journey with someone who should not be trusted behind a wheel.

Impossible to believe, impossible to stop reading

This is why the novel feels both frustrating and impossible to put down. I did not believe that anyone was behaving sensibly. Not even the ones who only had small snippets of the information. Not even for their alleged age. I did believe that they would keep escalating the situation until I had no choice but to find out how bad it became. My most consistent reading response was not swooning or outrage. It was the verbal equivalent of watching someone approach a clearly labelled trap: Noah. WTF. No. STOP!

The romance also works through intensity rather than plausibility. Noah and Nick are drawn together by conflict, proximity and the discovery that their first assumptions about one another are incorrect. Oh, and also matching tattoos. *sigh* Their attraction is forbidden (being stepsiblings) which makes every encounter feel more urgent, but it also means the story often asks “chemistry” to do the heavy lifting where a slower development of trust might otherwise be more believable. Whether that succeeds depends largely on how willing you are to surrender to the melodrama.

I was not entirely willing. I was, however, still reading.

And then there is the language…

And then there is the language. *another sigh*

I desperately hoped this was a translation problem, but alas, apparently it is not.

The writing firmly positions the book as YA, despite some decidedly non-YA content. If I were judging it on the prose alone, I’d place it somewhere between House of Night and Eragon on the Poorly Written Books List™. Because the novel uses a first-person dual narrative, we get extensive access to both Noah’s and Nick’s thoughts. Which actually confirms that they are both idiots. And I do not mean that in an adorable, romantic way.

Almost everything is told to us and then thoroughly re-explained, often through painfully earnest (and immature) internal monologues. The language swings between multisyllabic words that make the characters sound as though they are trying very hard to appear intelligent, toddler-level tantrums, and streams of consciousness resembling a ten-year-old working through a comprehension exercise.

One of the greatest improvements made by both films is therefore very simple: we cannot hear anyone’s thoughts.

Culpa mía — the Spanish film

The good girl the story needs

I want to start by clarifying that I did watch the dubbed version so I could watch the actual film (it’s very pretty), and not just read it.

The Spanish film is reasonably faithful to the shape and tone of the novel. It streamlines events, as any adaptation must, but it retains the central contrast that makes Noah’s transformation meaningful: at the beginning, she is presented as the responsible ‘good girl’ being dragged away from her life and into Nick’s dangerous world. (Interestingly the location is never mentioned in the movie, but it definitely feels Mediterranean.)

That distinction matters. Noah is not supposed to arrive as Nick’s female equivalent. Her fascination with racing, partying and everything he represents is compelling because it disrupts the version of herself that she and everyone around her recognise. From memory (and this could be incorrect) I don’t even think she had sex with the ex-boyfriend. She is supposed to be the quintessential ‘good girl’ at the start.

The Spanish casting and characterisation preserve that visual opposition more convincingly. We can see why these two people dismiss one another before they meet, and why discovering the person beneath the image becomes part of the attraction.

What the props are telling us

The film reinforces Noah’s conventional intelligence and respectability by showing her reading classic novels by choice. On the surface, this is efficient visual shorthand: she is bookish, thoughtful and a good girl. But the books she is seen reading are far more interesting than a generic ‘look, she reads!’ prop.

Noah is first seen with Pride and Prejudice, a story driven by two people forming confident and deeply inaccurate opinions of one another. Before Noah and Nick have even met, each has already decided who the other must be. Their initial hostility is shaped by those assumptions, and their relationship can only develop once they begin to recognise how wrong they were.

Her second book is Romeo and Juliet, which foreshadows the way Noah and Nick later perceive their own relationship: forbidden, intensely romantic and threatened by their families. The film makes the connection explicit when they joke about running away together and point out that their families are not the Capulets and Montagues.

This is a small but deliberate piece of adaptation: internal characterisation and thematic foreshadowing translated into objects the camera can show us.

The context lost in adaptation

The Spanish film does remove some context that helped the book’s version of Noah. In particular, reducing the former best friend (not even cast) and ex-boyfriend situation makes her old life appear less complicated, and it minimises the stress created by the letters which weakens the sense that danger has followed her into the new house. Because what danger?

There are also some differences that feel like odd choices, including how Jenna and Noah meet and how the race unfolds. In the book, Ronnie agrees to race Nick and doesn’t realise that Noah has secretly taken Nick’s place until the race is already underway. When Noah beats him, Ronnie claims Nick’s car anyway because Nick wasn’t driving and therefore failed to honour the terms of their wager. It’s underhanded, but the logic tracks.

In this film, however, Ronnie convinces Noah to race him despite her not wanting to (which is itself a deviation from her character) and therefore knows from the beginning that Nick isn’t driving. Yet when Noah beats him, Ronnie still claims Nick’s car on the basis that “Nick wasn’t driving”. He creates the exact circumstances he then uses to invalidate Noah’s win. Which is genuinely nonsensical at first glance. The story needs Nick to surrender his car for the climax to work, but the altered race storyline makes the outcome feel contrived. So why change it?

Unless you’re looking to show the viewer who these characters are instead of telling us. Noah is the good girl and reluctant to link to her past. Ronnie is deceitful and wants to win any way he can. But maybe I’m speculating.

The overall result is a cleaner story, but not always a richer one. In some cases, the film seems to assume that the viewer has read the book. The letters are treated as a significant threat without the film establishing the stress they cause Noah, while Ronnie’s harassment is so reduced that her fear of him loses important context. Some of Noah’s choices lose the emotional scaffolding that made them understandable, even when they were still terrible.

Faithful does not mean sensible

Even so, Culpa mía understands the appeal of the book. It embraces the melodrama, the forbidden attraction and the heightened world of racing, violence, wealth and family secrets. And it does a much better job of showing, not telling.

It does not, however, make the story sensible. Frankly, that may be beyond the powers of cinema. But it generally preserves the characters’ starting points, which means their movement towards each other has a clearer shape.

My Fault: London — the English film

A different Noah = not MY fault?

My Fault: London makes a very different bargain. It cuts more of the novel, alters the cultural and visual setting, and gives us a Noah who feels tougher and more rebellious from the outset.

The casting is wild when compared with the book’s original good-girl/dangerous-boy contrast. London’s Noah does not seem like someone being pulled off the straight and narrow by Nick. She appears to have arrived with one foot already over the line.

That change costs the adaptation, though. If Noah is already coded as a bad girl, Nick’s world does not destabilise her identity in the same way.

That change also weakens the meaning of the title. In the book’s prologue, Nick looks back on everything that happened (or is about to happen for the reader) and blames himself for leading Noah astray. But London’s Noah was already rebellious before she met him, so Nick can no longer plausibly believe that everything that happened from drawing Noah into his world was entirely “my fault”. Which leaves the viewer wondering: what exactly is whose fault?

The relationship also becomes less about two people discovering that their assumptions were wrong and more about recognising a similarity neither initially wants to admit. That can still produce chemistry, but it is a very different relationship arc.

Speed is the solution

The London film also strips away material that gave the novel additional context. As a translation of the book, it is technically less complete. As a film on its own, however, I think it is better.

It is faster and more confident about what the audience has come to see. The attraction escalates, the danger arrives and the story keeps moving. There is very little time to sit with any individual decision before the next argument, revelation or crisis takes over. Usually, removing context makes character behaviour feel less convincing. Here, the pace performs a kind of narrative sleight-of-hand and prevents us from inspecting the logic too closely.

In the novel, I had time to stop and ask why Noah would do that, why Nick would go along with it, why nobody told an adult, or why any of these people were responding to danger in the least effective way available. London drags the viewer to the next scene before you can complete the question.

That is not sophisticated storytelling. It is, however, very effective storytelling for this material.

The film understands that My Fault thrives on momentum. The audience needs to experience the escalating attraction and danger almost as Noah does: quickly, emotionally and with limited opportunity for reflection. The story becomes convincing. Not because London repairs its logic, but because it changes the conditions under which we judge that logic.

This is also why the larger adaptation choices, however unfaithful, feel coherent within the film. A tougher Noah belongs in this sharper, faster version. She can meet Nick’s energy immediately, and their conflict begins at full force. I miss the clearer transformation offered by the book and Spanish film, but I can’t deny that London’s approach creates a more immediately watchable dynamic.

Faithfulness is not the same as understanding

Adaptation conversations often collapse into a checklist. Was this character the same? Did they look how they were described? Was that subplot and/or small detail included? Did the film reproduce the scenes readers loved? Those questions matter, but they can’t tell us whether a film works as its own piece of art.

Culpa mía is more faithful to the novel’s characterisation. It gives us a recognisably bookish, responsible Noah and preserves more of the contrast between her and Nick. Its literary props add thoughtful visual storytelling. Even where it removes context, it feels interested in translating the book rather than simply borrowing its premise.

My Fault: London is more willing to rebuild. Its Noah is different. Its location is different. And its compressed story loses material that made the novel’s choices easier to understand. Yet it identifies something crucial about the experience of My Fault: the story is strongest when the audience is being carried forward too quickly to resist it.

The book gives us the most information (in the most annoying way) but also the most time to notice its weaknesses. The Spanish film gives us the clearest translation of the original characters. The London film gives us the best-shaped movie.

None of those achievements is quite the same thing.

So, which version is best?

In my opinion, My Fault: London is the best of all three stories.

It’s not a faithful adaptation. Its Noah is markedly different from the other two, and it removes much of the repeated context that explains everyone’s behaviour. But it is the smoothest, tidiest and most effective version of this story.

The novel sets the entire premise in an overly explained way. The Spanish film understands the book’s characters better. The London film understands the experience better. My Fault works when the audience is swept into the attraction, danger and melodrama before we have time to inspect the increasingly questionable logic holding it all together.

So, My Fault: London may not preserve the novel best, but it understands exactly how fast this story needs to move.

Which is fast enough that I cannot yell ‘WTAF NOAH’ before she has already made the next terrible decision.

Have you read MyFault or seen its adaptations?