Shipping News

I read Shipping News this weekend and I'm not sure why it won the Pulitzer. It was hard to read, mostly because the sentences tended to be extremely short and fragmented, giving the whole thing a choppy feel. I didn't get engaged in the story until page 107 and then it wasn't because of the story but because the book is sprinkled with short stories. Most of the book in fact is tell, not show, with the various characters talking about stuff that happened. It was an okay book but mostly forgettable.

I'm baffled that it was made into a film. How do you turn it into a visual story? I wonder who did the script.