The sequel to the 2015 Goosebumps movie, based on the bestselling book series by R.L. Stine, now has a premiere date: January 26, 2018.

According to ComingSoon, fans should expect a smooth transition to the second film as most of the major players are returning including director Rob Letterman (Shark Tale, Monsters vs. Aliens) and screenwriter Darren Lemke (Turbo). Although star Jack Black is expected to return as star, he hasn’t yet signed on.

The first film did well enough in theaters to justify a sequel, and did even better on home video. Sony wasn’t waiting for box office confirmation, however, having planned a series from the start, as sites such as Movieweb and Screen Rant report, with pre-production underway even before the first film opened nationwide.

We posted a story on the possible bump for the books with the first film, pointing out tie-in editions and the reissue of Classic Goosebumps (with the line “Now a Major Motion Picture” on the covers).

Also look out for Goosebumps: Most Wanted, another series reissuing the most “notorious, creepiest, ghouliest Goosebumps characters.” The most recent is Lizard of Oz (Goosebumps: Most Wanted #10) by R.L. Stine (Scholastic, Sept. 2016; OverDrive Sample).

Expect the same attention to tie-ins and re-releases once the second film gets further along.

As a reminder, here is the trailer from the first film:

One of the biggest names in Fantasy is going to the movies.

Brandon Sanderson’s YA series, The Reckoners, has just been bought by 20th Century Fox in what Deadline Hollywood calls “a hotly contested” deal. Both Steelheart and Firefight, the first two books in the series, will be adapted.

Deadline describes the series:

“a burst in the sky gave ordinary people extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics, but with incredible gifts came the desire to rule. In what was once Chicago, an … Epic named Steelheart installed himself as emperor. Nobody fights back but the Reckoners, a shadowy group of ordinary humans who spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.”

Steelheart came out in 2013 (PRH/Delacorte Press; RH Audio; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Firefight followed in 2015 (PRH/Delacorte Press; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Calamity, the final book in the trilogy, came out in 2016 (PRH/Delacorte Press; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample). The trade paperback of Calamity hits shelves on 2/28/17 (PRH/Ember).

Also in the works, from MGM, is Sanderson’s Snapshot, a SF detective thriller novella about a society, says Deadline, that:

“can create a snapshot of a specific day in time. The experiences people have, the paths they follow — all of them are real again for one day in the snapshot. All for the purposes of investigation by the court. The cop uses it as a way to find where a criminal dumped a weapon or what really happened in a domestic dispute. It’s drudgery, until the day the cop investigates the memory of a call that was never logged, and he makes a horrifying discovery.”

According to Sanderson’s website, the print book comes out in February in an expensive leather-bound edition, but also as a simultaneous ebook and, later in 2017, in a regular hardcover edition.

The film adaptation of Hidden Figures continued to do well at the box office in its second week of wide release, boosting sales of both the original hardcover and the tie-in (now at #5 on USA Today‘s list). On TV, Netflix’s major launch of the adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events is flying high, with strong reviews (example, the New York Times) and the expectation that there will be a season two.

Unfortunately, the news was not good for the wide release of Ben Affleck’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night, which failed to do well with critics as well as audiences.

This week, Lifetime brings back Beaches, as a TV movie on Jan. 21. Idina Menzel (Frozen) and Nia Long (The Best Man Holiday) star in the revival of the 1988 Garry Marshall film that Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey made famous. The weepy is based on the Iris Rainer Dart novel of the same name, published in 1985. There is no tie-in but the book is still in print (HaperCollins/Morrow Paperbacks, 2004).

For those that do not know the story, E! News offers a summary: “Beaches follows the serendipitous meeting of two young girls … who, despite vastly different lifestyles, maintain an unexpected, yet lifelong friendship. CC (Menzel) is an aspiring singer trying to make it work in Los Angeles until she’s discovered by a director who gives her big break, while Hillary (Long) is the daughter of a prominent civil rights lawyer who struggles to find her own destiny.”

Menzel, known for her award-winning voice, admitted to E! News she was worried about stepping into Midler’s shoes, saying if “I’m being completely honest, I was terrified to do it at first because I love the movie, it’s a beautiful, beautiful movie and both of those women—especially Bette Midler, for me—were idol[s] my whole life.”

The TV series adaptation of Time After Time, based on the 1979 time travel novel by Karl Alexander, as well its earlier film version, will premiere in a 2-hour episode on March 3.

The book features author H.G. Wells who creates an actual version of the apparatus featured in his novel The Time Machine, which is used by Jack the Ripper to escape to 1970’s era San Fransicso, with Wells on his heels (the Kirkus review gives an amusing summary of the convoluted plot).

For the TV series, the US location was changed to present-day New York.

A trailer for the pilot came out in May. Since then the female lead has been recast with Nicole Ari Parker as the character played by Regina Taylor.

No tie-in has been scheduled, but the book is still available, in a 2010 paperback reprint (Forge Books, 978-0765326225; OverDrive Sample).

Adaptations took home several prizes from last night’s Golden Globe Awards, although the big winner was the original, La La Land.

Technically, Moonlight, which won for Best Picture, is an adaptation, since it is based on an unpublished school drama project titled In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney. 

Fulfilling expectations, Viola Davis won as best supporting actress for her work in Fences. Denzel Washington, who starred and directed, was nominated as Best Actor, but did not win. Tie-in: Fences (Movie tie-in) by August Wilson (PRH/Plume).

Aaron Taylor-Johnson won as best supporting actor for Nocturnal Animals. The tie-in uses the original title of the novel, Tony and Susan, Austin Wright (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; OverDrive Sample).

In TV, The Night Manager produced three winners. Tom Hiddleston won for best actor. Olivia Colman and Hugh Laurie both won for supporting roles. Tie-in: The Night Manager (TV Tie-in Edition) by John le Carré (PRH/Ballantine Books; OverDrive Sample).

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story also did well. It won for best series, with Sarah Paulson, who played Marcia Clark, winning for best actress. The show is based on Jeffrey Toobin’s 1996 book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. The tie-in edition (Random House; OverDrive Sample) came out last September.

Elle won Best Motion Picture in the Foreign Language with its star Isabelle Huppert winning for best actress, drama. The film is based on Oh… by Philippe Djian (Gallimard, 2012; not published in the US).

After its limited release opening on Christmas Day, Live by Night expands nationwide this Friday. Based on Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night (Harper/ Morrow; Harperluxe; HarperAudio), starring Ben Affleck who also directs. 

The first Friday the 13th of the year offers an auspicious start to a beloved series best known for its unfortunateness. The long-awaited adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket (HarperCollins, 1999 – 2006), begins streaming on Netflix.

The show stars Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf and Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, and Presley Smith as Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire.

Reviews thus far are good. The Chicago Tribune calls it a “weird, wonderful masterpiece.”

A.V. Club says “A fairy tale for macabre bookworms who’ve graduated from Roald Dahl but aren’t ready for Edward Gorey … This blend of tragedy and twee … [is] Kids stuff with adult sophistication, driven by two-part stories, outrageous visuals, and the scenery-chewing of big-name guest stars.”

The horror film Bye Bye Man, based on a chapter in the 2005 nonfiction book The President’s Vampire: Strange-but-True Tales of the United States of America by Robert Damon Schneck (Anomalist Books, 2005), also opens on the 13th.

The film stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Faye Dunaway, Douglas Smith, Cressida Bonas, Lucien Laviscount, and Douglas Jones and tells the supposedly true story of three friends who get into trouble when they mess around with a Ouija board.

The adaptation has had a bumpy path to the silver screen. Yahho! TV reported “the pic was first slotted in October around Halloween, then moved up to June, then back to December. Now, it’s being pushed to next year at a time when horror films traditionally have opened well.”

No reviews yet but Movie Pilot has a story about how “true” the story might be.

A tie-in edition came out in May 2016 under the title, The Bye Bye Man: And Other Strange-but-True Tales (PRH/TarcherPerigee; Penguin Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Alone in Berlin, based on the German WWII novel, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House, 2010; OverDrive Sample) opens in a limited number of theaters and with no tie-in. Starring Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, and Daniel Brühl, it received a mixed review from Variety when it appeared in the Berlin film festival. 

As NPR reported at that time, Fallada was a best selling author between WWI and II, with his books picked as book-of-the-month-club selections and adapted into Hollywood films (which got him blacklisted by the Nazis).

However, Every Man Dies Alone wasn’t published in English until 2009, after Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson heard about the book from the fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg and tracked it down.

When it finally did come out here, it was a best seller and became a NYT‘s Notable Book and one of The New Yorker‘s Favorite Fiction Books of the year.

The June 2nd debut of the new Wonder Woman film is just six months away making it high time, according to  PopSugar to “Brush Up on Her Story From the Comics.” It may also be a good time to create virtual and actual displays.

There’s much to choose from. As PopSugar points out, the warrior princess has her roots in the 1940s so there is a long list of print titles detailing her adventures. WorldCat shows over 4,000 titles in libraries. For introductions and reading guides to the various series, turn to Comic Book Herald and Den of Geek! 

It’s also a good time to pull out the 2014 title,  The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) which received strong reviews, including those from Entertainment Weekly and the NYT .

EW gave in an A, saying it is “a great read. It has nearly everything you might want in a page-turner: tales of S&M, skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most ”serious” feminist history — fun.”

Tie-in editions are upcoming

Wonder Woman: The Official Movie Novelization, Nancy Holder (PRH/Titan Books, June 6, 2017). Following what has become a tradition for superhero movies, the novelization arrives after the movie release, to avoid spoilers.

Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film, Sharon Gosling (PRH/Titan Books, May 30, 2017).

Wonder Woman Movie Deluxe Junior Novel, Steve Korte (HC/HarperFestival, May 2, 2017) as well as several leveled readers (see our catalog of tie-ins for a full list).

Libraries in need of extra copies of the book, as opposed to the screenplay, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, are in luck.

After being out of print for years, it is being re-released with a new forward and jacket. It will also contain updated “content that reflects the exciting developments in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World” according to a Scholastic press release.

The book will be published simultaneously in print and as a Pottermore eBook edition.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Hogwarts Library Book)
Newt Scamander, J.K. Rowling
Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic)
On Sale Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN 9781338132311, 1338132318
Hardcover | 128 pages |$12.99 USD

The glitzy award season starts Sunday, Jan. 8 with the Golden Globes, which honors both film and TV and is known for being less formal than the Oscars, in no small part because drinks are available to the guests throughout the evening.

There are many literary connections among the nominees, from Outlander and Game of Thrones to Fences and The Night Manager.

LitHub offers a run down of them all, along with the awards each is up for and a short summary.

Perhaps even more interesting is their list of snubs, which they call “frankly outrageous.” Titles that did not make the cut this year include The Handmaiden, Orange is the New Black, Love & Friendship, and Certain Women.

About The Handmaiden, LitHub says, “The movie is gorgeous, sensual, terrifying, and an utterly captivating experience—more captivating even than its source material. It’s a stunning achievement, and it should really get every award.”

Love & Friendship is defended with “A generally underrated (or at least under-discussed) film this year, but actually great. Whit Stillman! Kate Beckinsale! Chloë Sevigny! Jane Austen, except meaner than you remember! Well-acted, lively, and satisfyingly acerbic.”

LitHub also lists The Girl on the Train but says “Just kidding. Even Emily Blunt couldn’t save this movie.”

EW offers a full list of the nominees and where they can be viewed.

Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove (S&S/Atria, July 2014) is taking off again, rising on Amazon and building yet another holds queue. Already generally exceeding a 3:1 ratio in print (in some libraries we checked it is as high as 15:1) the second wave of attention is due to the film’s release On Demand and on disc. Holds for the film version are topping 44:1.

The movie recently made the Oscar shortlist in the Foreign Film category, meaning it has made the second round-cut (one more winnowing will be made by Jan. 15th to decide the five final nominees – IndieWire explains  the complicated and insider-y process).

Entertainment Weekly gave the film a strong B+ review, writing it “is a darkly funny, tragic, and ultimately heartwarming tearjerker.”

The Washington Post says it is like St. Vincent and Gran Torino but “a bit riskier and more intriguing.”

NPR takes a contrarian view, writing it “won’t win Best Foreign Film this year, nor should it, but it’s worth your time, and it’s easy to see why this proudly populist movie was a smash hit in Sweden … [the] modest dramedy … is as sweetly sincere as it is market-driven, with gusts of saving black comedy rolling in to rescue it from excess goo.”

Like Backman’s books, a large part of the film’s buzz is based on word of mouth. IndieWire reports it opened with modest results and then grew steadily at every theater that ran it. When “other high-profile movies like Birth of a Nation, American Pastoral, and American Honey declined at the box office, arthouse exhibitors turned to Ove. And it just kept chugging along.”

Backman keeps chugging along too. See our stories about his rise and next books.

Two high-profile film adaptations expand nationwide this week, Hidden Figures and A Monster Calls (see our coverage from their Oscar-qualifying opening week).

On NBC, a new series based on The Wizard of Oz begins.

Emerald City is billed as a “modern reimagining” of the backstory of L. Frank Baum’s famous tale.

After a rocky path to the screen, involving delays and major changes in the lead team, it finally premieres Jan. 6 at 9 EST and will run for 10 episodes in its opening season. Tarsem Singh (Mirror Mirror, Self/less) directs. Shaun Cassidy (Cold Case) serves as executive producer.

Deadline Hollywood says the show is “gunning for” the Game of Thrones label, writing it offers a “dark new take” in which “Dorothy [is] transported by tornado along with a K9 police dog into a mystical land of competing realms, lethal warriors, dark magic and a bloody battle for supremacy.”

ScreenCrush calls it an “ultra-ultra-ultra-gritty take” and details the cast: “Adria Arjona as Dorothy Gale (complete with K9 police dog Toto), Dracula star Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Scarecrow-type Lucas, Florence Kasumba as the Wicked Witch of the East, Joely Richardson as Glinda, [and] Vincent D’Onofrio as the Wizard of Oz.”

Calling the book a “sensation,” Deadline Hollywood reports that film rights were just acquired to Kill The Next One, a psychological thriller by Argentinian-born Federico Axat (Hachette/Mulholland Books; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample). Published in Spanish “to acclaim,” rights were also sold for translation into 30 other languages.

Released here earlier this month, it received a good, but not sensational, review in the most recent NYT BR crime column: “mind-bending … Truth, illusion and downright deceit keep crossing invisible lines in this hallucinatory plot.” However, the review continues, “it becomes easy to lose focus on who’s who and what’s what. The shape-shifting characters and fantastic events keep sending [the main character] to his therapist (and us to ours) for clarification … Axat is the kind of hypnotic writer you love to read but can never entirely trust.”

Other coverage to date, while decent, does not indicate a “sensation”:

USA Today includes it on a recent list of new and noteworthy books, quoting the Booklist review that also calls it “mind-bending” as well as “intriguing.”

PW gave it a star, writing “Axat fuses weird fiction with psychological suspense in his stunning U.S. debut.” 

Bustle counts it as one of “The 8 Best Fiction Books Coming Out This December That Are Perfect For Holiday Snuggles,” writing “Like a chilling, murder-y version of Pay It Forward, this thriller unfolds as a man seeking to end his life is given the opportunity to kill two other people and then be killed.”

Canadian librarians picked it as a November Loan Stars title.

Holds are commensurate with cautious ordering in American libraries we checked, but Hollywood’s excitement may foretell growing interest.

Already looking forward to the film adaptation of her debut novel, Everything, Everything, YA author Nicola Yoon is two for two as her second novel, The Sun Is Also a Star (PRH/Delacorte Press; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample), is also headed to the silver screen, reports Deadline Hollywood.

Warner Bros and MGM have teamed up to make the 2016 novel about a teen girl who falls in love as her family faces deportation.

A critical as well as commercial hit, it was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and is on many best book lists, including those compiled by Entertainment Weekly, Horn Book, the LA Times, and the NYT.

Everything, Everything is set to release on May 19, 2017. On her web site, Yoon has been tracking the progress.

The upcoming holiday weekend is generally a big one for movie openings, but there is a complication this year. Christmas Day falls at the end of the weekend, so there will be less time for families to search out entertainment to round out their festivities. In addition, studios are not willing to schedule films to go up against the second week of Rogue One, which proved expectations with a “massive” debut this week.

But studios need to get movies in to theater to qualify for the Oscars, so several will open in limited runs in the upcoming week.

Bucking the trend, one adaptation debuts across the country on Christmas Day, Fences, Denzel Washington’s film version of August Wilson’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play. Washington directs and co-stars with Viola Davis, reprising their roles from a Broadway revival of the play six years ago, for which both won Tony Awards.

The Guardian writes “This film is conceived as a showcase for its performers, and, as that, it is immaculate … Would Wilson be pleased? A black director, extraordinary performances, as faithful an adaptation as you can imagine. He’d be ecstatic.”

Vanity Fair offers an alternative title for the film: “Please Hurry Up and Give Viola Davis an Oscar.”

A tie-in came out on Dec. 6, Fences (Movie tie-in), August Wilson (PRH/Plume).

Six other film adaptations open in limited release this week:

Patriots Day, the drama recounting the Boston Marathon bombing. Directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) it stars Mark Wahlberg, J. K. Simmons, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and Michelle Monaghan.

It is based on the nonfiction title, Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge (UP New England/ForeEdge), which traces the events of the bombing and the citywide manhunt to find the terrorists.

The Hollywood Reporter says the film is “Kinetic, well cast and technically impressive — but not as stirring as it might have been.”

Variety calls it “An intense, jittery re-creation … [a] genuinely exciting megaplex entertainment, informed by extensive research, featuring bona fide movie stars, and staged with equal degrees of professionalism and respect.”

The film opens in limited release on December 21 with a wide release on January 13, 2017. There is no tie-in.

A Monster Calls was originally scheduled for release on October 21, but the the film adaptation of the children’s fantasy by Patrick Ness moved to a holiday opening due to what Deadline called “a complete nightmare in regards to competition … the pic’s new date gives it ample time to breathe and spur word-of-mouth during the year-end holidays and into 2017.”

Thus far, reviews are mixed for this fantasy-reality drama about a boy coping with his mother’s illness and his own troubles. The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “sensitive and beautifully made lesson in the limits and power of storytelling … The fact that not every terrible thing can be remedied or appropriately punished is a tough lesson even for adults to learn, but A Monster Calls helps find the sense in it.”

Variety, however, was less impressed, calling it “an incredibly small and intimate gothic fable … [that is] all bark and no bite.”

There are two tie-ins:

A Monster Calls: Special Collectors’ Edition (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay, (Candlewick, October 4, 2016).

A Monster Calls: A Novel (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay (Candlewick, August 2, 2016, Trade Paperback).

The film opens on December 23, followed by a wide release on January 6.

Silence opens on Dec. 23, with a wide release coming later in January (the specific date has yet to be announced).

Directed by Martin Scorsese, it is an adaptation of the novel by Shusaku Endo,  first published in 1966. It is a book that Scorsese writes in the introduction to the tie-in,  Silence, (Peter Owen Publishers, Dec. 1; trade paperback, Macmillan/Picador Modern Classics), he has “reread countless times,” one that has given him “a kind of sustenance” that he has “found in only a very few works of art.”

Starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver, it is set in about a Portuguese Jesuit priest who persecuted along with other Christians in Japan in the 17th C.

Variety says it is a “challenging, yet beautiful spiritual journey.” While they also call it a “a remarkable achievement,” they warn “Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments. It is too subdued for Scorsese-philes, too violent for the most devout, and too abstruse for the great many moviegoers who such an expensive undertaking hopes to attract.”

SlashFilm has a round-up of additional reviews.

Hidden Figures opens on Christmas Day in some theaters, with a nationwide release on Jan. 6.

It is one of the hot films of the season, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as a group of African American women who worked at NASA on the mission that sent John Glenn into space in 1962. Director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) was so taken with the script that he dropped out of the running to direct a Spiderman movie in favor of this one.

Variety says it is a “thoroughly satisfying … Feel-good drama” that is “As brash, bright, and broad as Hollywood studio movies come.”

Tie-in: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly (HC/William Morrow Paperbacks; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample).

Live by Night opens on December 25, followed by a national release on January 13, 2017 and is Ben Affleck’s first time in the director’s chair since his award-winning Argo. Not only does he direct and star, he wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night (Harper/ Morrow; Harperluxe; HarperAudio).

Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina and Elle Fanning also feature in this period gangster film set during the Prohibition era.

Variety reports that Affleck told reporters at an early screening “that the idea for him was blending a throwback vibe with modern energy. And that’s fitting: In Lehane’s novel, Affleck has found a gangster yarn akin to the ’30s and ’40s genre pictures that inspired him, but one with a fresh face.”

Live by Night follows The Given Day, which was the author’s first departure into historical crime. A third book in the series, World Gone By, was published last year.

There are multiple tie-ins: The mass market will arrive on Dec. 27, while the trade paperback (both HarperCollins/Morrow) came out on Dec. 6.

The Spanish language film Julieta is based on three linked short stories from Alice Munro’s collection Runaway (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”). It opens in limited release on Dec. 21st.

Written and directed by Academy Award-winner Pedro Almodóvar, it stars Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte along with Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Darío Grandinetti, Michelle Jenner, and Rossy de Palma.

The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it “Almodóvar’s best film in a decade” and describing it as “a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love.”

American critics were less impressed. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “A tie-me-downer of a pastiche” while Variety says it is “far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.”

Tie-in: Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition): Three Stories That Inspired the Movie, Alice Munro (PRH/Vintage; OverDrive Sample).

The cast and director of the upcoming film Hidden Figures will be hosted tonight by First Lady Michelle Obama at a special White House screening.

In addition to several cast members, 97-year-old Katherine G. Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson in the film, is also expected to attend. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year. NASA profiles her as “The Girl Who Loved to Count.”

Below is the ceremony. Johnson’s award begins at 30:24.

Hidden Figures is based on a book that is #5 on Time magazine’s list of the best nonfiction of the year, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, released as a tie-in last month, (HC/William Morrow Paperbacks; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample). 

It is one of the hot films of the season and debuts in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run, on Christmas Day. It will open in wide release on January 6.

Early reviews are strong. The Wrap says the movie:

“not only stirringly celebrates intelligent women of color (and the very idea of science itself), but it also offers a more realistic-seeming portrayal of racism than we generally get in American movies … Hidden Figures is feel-good history, but it works, and it works on behalf of heroes from a cinematically under-served community. These smart, accomplished women had the right stuff, and so does this movie.”