Before you roll your eyes and exclaim, “Not another person jumping on the Y.A. movie bandwagon,” consider the book that Lena Dunham wants to adapt. It’s not dystopian, or an angst-filled teen romance, but Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy, (HMH/Clarion) the 1994 Newbery Honor book about a girl growing up in the 13th century.

Interviewed at the New Yorker Festival on Friday night, Dunham said, “I’m going to adapt it and hopefully direct it, I just need to find someone who wants to fund a PG-13 medieval movie.”

She also said she has been obsessed with the book since she was a kid. If her tattoos from children’s books didn’t already tip you off, she is a big reader. In a 2012 NYT Book Review interview, she mentioned dozens of books, and said Birdy one of the two best books she’s ever read about girls. The other one? Nabokov’s Lolita.

UPDATE:
EarlyWord Kids Correspondent Lisa Von Drasek is such a fan of this book that, when told her the news, she instantly recalled the opening lines, nearly verbatim (we know; checked the OverDrive Sample):

I am commanded to write an account of my days; I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.

The 20th anniversary edition, published as part of a re-release of 4 of Cushman’s books in trade paperback, includes an intro by Linda Sue Park (also on the OverDrive Sample), who says, “Cushman shows us a very different image of medieval England from the one we are used to seeing. Dirtier and smellier, yes, but also fuller, richer and more complete.”

We have to wonder how Dunham, who says in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, that she was a germaphobe as a kid, was able to deal with those details.

The favorite children’s book, Madeline (Penguin/Viking Juvenile) turns 75 this year and is celebrated with an exhibition at the New York Historical Society and a feature yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning.

A 75th Anniversary Edition of the book, that includes a pop-up spread of Paris, was published in May.

John Bemelmans Marciano, the originator’s grandson, is interviewed on the show.

He has published several books that continue Madeline’s adventures, including  Madeline at the White House, (Penguin/Viking Juvenile, 2011) a story that his grandfather and fan Jackie Kennedy once talked about doing.

Lionsgate has announced that John Krokidas (Kill Your Darlings, 2013) will direct the film adaptation of the word-of-mouth debut hit Wonder, R.J. Palacio, (RH/ Knopf Young Readers).

The book is still #1 on the NYT Middle Grade Best Sellers list after 96 weeks. Entertainment Weekly predicts the movie will also be successful, saying it’s “bound to be the latest in a string of enormously successful YA adaptations,” (presumably, referring to what Hollywood now calls “grounded” Y.A. adaptations, like The Fault in Our Stars and If I Stay, rather than the dystopian hits).

The big question: how will the movie deal with the main character’s facial deformity?

The trailer for the book avoided the issue:

A memoir, aimed at young adults, by a young woman who was diagnosed at 13 with HIV and then became the victim of bullying so ferocious that she considered suicide, is the next title in the Today Show Book Club.

Positive : A Memoir
Paige Rawl, Ali Benjamin, Jay Asher (Intro. by)
HarperCollins: August 26, 2014
9780062342515, 0062342517
Hardcover
$18.99 USD, $23.99 CAD

OverDrive Sample

Former First Daughter Jenna Bush Hager introduced the author and the book on Monday’s show.

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The Today Show‘s book club began last fall with the debut Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, sending it on to best seller lists for a brief time. Since then, there have been just four more picks, the most recent in May, The Fault in Our Stars, which capitalized on the attention surrounding the movie.

For the new pick, the Today Show invites people to:

“Read along with TODAY viewers, sharing your reaction to the book on Twitter via @TODAYsBooks and the TODAY Book Club Google+ community. Be sure to follow the TODAY Book Club newsletter for the latest information.”

Hager will host an online conversation with Rawl on Nov. 14.

Just when you thought it was finally over, the Twilight series may be revived.

The New York Times reports that Lions Gate, the studio that bought the studio behind the films, and Stephenie Meyer, author of the books and producer on the final two feature-length Twilight movies, have announced plans for five short films based on the Twilight characters, to be shown exclusively on Facebook next year.

Partially funded by the organization Women in Film, the program, called The Storyteller: New Voices of the Twilight Saga, will invite women filmmakers to submit short films based on the Twilight characters. Five will be selected by a panel of women in the entertainment industry, including Meyer and Kristen Stewart, star of the feature films.

When the Twilight series was coming to a conclusion, there were rumors that Meyer was planning more books in the series. There’s been no news on that since.

Quvenzhané Wallis, who. at 9-years-old, was the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar for Beasts of the Southern Wild, (she was only 5 when she auditioned for the role. She is now 11), has been named as the lead for the film adaptation of Holly Goldberg Sloan’s  Counting by 7s (Penguin/Dial, 2013; Dreamscape audio)

Reviewed widely, the  book received 15 state awards. Released in 2013, it spent 5 weeks on the New York Times Children’s Middle Grade Best Sellers list. Recently released in paperback, it went back on the list at #6 this week.

Wallis has yet another starring role coming up, as Annie, based on the Broadway musical and on the cartoon series. That movie will be released Dec. 19.

Great news! Rachel Vail has published a new book and her Friendship Ring series is coming back into print.

I first discovered Vail back in 1991, when the novel Wonder (Scholastic/Orchard) was published. She wrote about hidden aggression in girls before teachers, librarians, and guidance councilors recognized that girls, too, are involved in bullying.

Rachel Vail tells stories of girls longing for friendship, of the dance that is friendship, how it blossoms and grows, then withers and dies and sometimes blooms again.

In the just-released Unfriended, a story told in many voices, we see the seduction of the “popular” girl from several 8th grader’s points of view. There’s Truly, who is at first dazzled by the cool kid’s attention. Then there’s Truly’s former best friend Hazel, whose jealously spirals out of control into bitter vengeance. Vail manages to capture family dynamics as well as the nuances of middle school society in this age of social media.

Penguin/Puffin is also bringing back into print The Friendship Ring. A six-book series that tells the same story from several different 7th grade character’s point of view, it was a tour de force when first published in 1998. Unfortunately, the books were originally released in a small format that seemed targeted to an audience too young to appreciate them. Now reissued in paperback, these are perfect for ages 10 and older and there are no worries that a 4th grader might pick them up.

The first four volumes are now available:

Published 6/12/14″

If You Only Knew (Friendship Ring, #1)

Please, Please, Please (Friendship Ring, #2)

Published, 9/25/14:

Not That I Care (Friendship Ring, #3)

What Are Friends For? (Friendship Ring, #4)

To come:

Popularity Contest (Friendship Ring, #5)

Fill In The Blank (Friendship Ring, #6)

Dystopia is not over.

Even before  the film adaptation of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner  became #1 at the box office this weekend, Fox anointed it an official success by announcing that the sequel is in pre-production in New Mexico, with the director, Wes Ball returning, as well as the lead, Dylan O’Brien.

The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials, also the title of the second book in the series (RH/Delaccorte). is scheduled to debut in theaters in one year, on Sept. 18, 2015.

No announcement has been made about whether the third title in the trilogy, The Death Cure, will also be adapted, but that seems highly likely.

After the box office disappointment of The Giver, with no sequel in sight. this may hearten those behind other potential series, like The Seventh Son, based on The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch, the first in a series by Joseph Delaney, scheduled for release on Feb. 6 next year and The 5th Wave, based on the first in a series by Rick Yancey, scheduled for release on Jan. 29, 2016.

After several teasers, the first full trailer has arrived (Forbes analyzes Lionsgate’s spoiler-free advertising campaign). Released Monday, it’s already been viewed over 7 million times.

Entertainment Weekly analyzes what the 1:48 minutes reveal.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1, releases on Nov. 21. Part 2 arrives a year later.

Tie-in (for other upcoming movie tie-ins, check our catalog on Edelweiss)

Mockingjay: Movie Tie-In Edition
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic: September 30, 2014
9780545796682, 0545796687
$12.99 USD

Model/actress Cara Delevingne is in talks to star as Margo, the mysterious girl next door, in the adaptation of  John Green’s novel Paper Towns, (Penguin/Dutton, 2008)

Nat Wolff, who played a supporting role in TFIOS, will star as Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, who has been in love with her from afar for years.

Green, who is an executive producer on the film, tweeted yesterday, “Cara Delevigne’s audition blew everyone away (including me!) and she understands Margo profoundly. I am so excited!”

The movie is scheduled for theatrical release on 7/31/15.

In other Y.A. adaptation news, a new version of Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973) is in the works. The 1997 adaptation starred Jennifer Love Hewitt. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Anne Heche. No stars or director have been named for this version. Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall (1972) is also in the works and is being proceeded by Stephenie Meyer. Lionsgate recently acquired the rights.

We report on only the most significant adaptation stories here. Our database of adaptations in the works, Books to Movies and TV now includes information on over 300 titles, with more than 80 updated in the last month.

The National Book Awards long lists are being announced this week.

First up is the Young People’s Literature list. It will be followed by poetry tomorrow, nonfiction on Wednesday and, finally, fiction on Thursday.

Most of the names on this list are already award-winning authors and many have had titles on the longlist before (although none have won). The two relative newcomers are Kate Milford, author of Greenglass House, and Gail Giles, Girls Like Us.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 19 hosted by Daniel Handler, (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket).

Links are to the National Book Foudation annotations:

The Impossible Knife of Memory
Laurie Halse Anderson
(Viking/ Penguin Group USA)
Speak was a 1999 finalist

Girls Like Us
Gail Giles
(Candlewick Press)

Skink-No Surrender
Carl Hiaasen
(Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers/ Random House)
Hoot, was a  Newbery Honor title.

Greenglass House
Kate Milford
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Clarion Books)

Threatened
Eliot Schrefer
(Scholastic Press)
The author’s previous book, Endangered, was a 2012 finalist

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
Steve Sheinkin
(Roaring Brook Press/ Macmillan Publishers)
Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon was a 2012 finalist

100 Sideways Miles
Andrew Smith
(Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster)
Grasshopper Jungle, won the 2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Award

Noggin
John Corey Whaley
(Atheneum Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster)
Where Things Come Back, was a Printz Award Winner

Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two
Deborah Wiles
(Scholastic Press)
Each Little Bird That Sings, was a National Book Award Finalist

Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
(Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin Group (USA))
The author was a finalist for both Locomotion and Hush

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

“Mary Downing Hahn is the Stephen King of late middle grade fiction. Her haunting chilling tales are just right for those 4th graders who have outgrown Goosebumps and sophisticated enough to surprise the most jaded 7th grader,” says EarlyWord Kids Correspondent, Lisa Von Drasek.

A former school librarian from Maryland, Hahn has written dozens of novels for young readers.  Wait Till Helen Comes, (HMH Books for Young Readers; Brilliance Audio), has been continuously in print since 1986 and is now set for its screen debut, reports Variety. Maria Bello will star, with sisters Sophie Nelisse (The Book Thief) and Isabelle Nelisse (Mama). Shooting is set to begin at the end of the month in Winnipeg, Canada.

Yes, it’s true. He was interviewed about both roles on the Today Show:

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His new book, the children’s title, Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar which came out yesterday, is now at #8 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar

Theodora Richards, Keith Richards

Hachette/ Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

The film adaptation of John Green’s Paper Towns already has a release date, July 31, 2015. Now it has a director, as Green announced on Twitter last week.

It will be Jake Schrieber’s second feature film, after Robot & Frank.

Nat Wolff, who had the supporting role of Isaac in The Fault in Our Stars, will play Paper Town‘s lead, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. Green will act as executive producer. Love interest Margo has not yet been cast.