RED BAND SOCIETY, Origins
A new Fox TV series, The Red Band Society is the #1 People Pick of the week, which describes the pilot as “a small miracle — warm, intelligent, sympathetic and offbeat without being jarring … If you can imagine a show that somehow combines The Fault in Our Stars and Glee, that would be this one.”
Entertainment Weekly, features it in their Fall TV preview, with a slightly different description, “The Breakfast Club meets The Fault in Our Stars.”
Set in a pediatric hospital, about a group of kids with life-threatening diseases, it shares another characteristic with The Fault in Ours Stars that is rarely mentioned; it is based on a book, El mundo amarillo, (2008), Spanish author Albert Espinosa’s memoir of his ten years undergoing cancer treatments. In 2011, he adapted it into a successful Catalan TV series titled Polseres vermelles (The Red Band Society). Last year, Steven Spielberg bought the rights to produce a U.S. version.
Espinosa explains that the book “is about my life when I was very young. I had cancer from the age of fourteen to twenty-four, and during those ten years I lost a leg, a lung, and part of my liver, but it was also a happy time for me. In The Yellow World I do not talk about cancer, I talk about what I learned from cancer and everything it taught me about everyday life.” He uses the term “Yellow World” to signify a happy place, the color of the sun. “Red Band Society” refers to the bracelets the kids wear in the show.
When it was published in 2012 in the U.K., The Guardian noted that in Spain, it was “A word-of-mouth sensation … sold more than a million copies and … published in 20 other countries.”
It will be published in print in the U.S, for the first time tomorow as a tie-in, in both the original Spanish and in English (interestingly, the Spanish language edition currently is higher on Amazon’s sales rankings than the English translation).
Several libraries own the original Spanish language edition as well as a U.K. translation from Penguin.
Tie-ins:
The Yellow World How Fighting for My Life Taught Me How to Live, OverDrive Sample
Albert Espinosa
RH/Ballantine: September 16, 2014
9780345538123, 0345538129
Trade Paperback
$16.00 USD / $19.00 CAD
El mundo amarillo (Movie Tie-in Edition): Como luchar para sobrevivir me enseñó a vivir, OverDrive Sample
Albert Espinosa
RH/Vintage Espanol: September 16, 2014
9781101873762, 1101873760
Trade Paperback
$14.00 USD / $17.00 CAD
Official Web Site: Fox.com
Author site: AlbertEspinosa.com