Blockbuster books = blockbuster movies

Saoirse Ronan in How I Live Now. Photo by Magnolia Pictures.

Meg Rosoff’s acclaimed How I Live Now (Random, 2004) is about a NYC girl who spends an idyllic summer with her cousins in England right before an unnamed aggressor invades the UK and threatens the world’s existence. Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald is at the helm and Saoirse Ronan and George MacKay star. The film debuts this fall.

The movie adaptation of 2006 bestseller The Book Thief (Random) by Markus Zusak is already building Oscar buzz and will be in theaters on November 15. This World War II drama is directed by Brian Percival, and stars Sophie Nelisse as the titular heroine Liesel, and Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as her adoptive parents.

Seventh Son is based on the first installment in Joseph Delaney’s “The Last Apprentice” series (HarperCollins). In this dark fantasy, 14-year-old Tom Ward, a seventh son of a seventh son, goes on adventures as the Spook’s apprentice. Sergei Bodrov directs and Ben Barnes, Jeff Bridges, and Julianne Moore star. It features music composed by Tuomas Kantelinen. Originally scheduled to release on October 18, 2013, it will be out in theaters in 3-D and IMAX 3D on January 17, 2014.

Richelle Mead’s NYT-bestselling Vampire Academy (Penguin, 2007) is getting the film treatment in time for Valentine’s Day, 2014. Written by Daniel Waters of Heathers fame, and directed by his brother Mark Waters of Mean Girls fame, the story of best friends Rose, half-human/half-vampire, and Lissa, a mortal vampire princess who wreak havoc and fall in love at St. Vladimir’s Academy, is in capable hands. Starring Zoey Deutch, Lucy Fry, and Danila Kozlovsky, the movie is due out on February 14, 2014.

Positioned to be the next “Hunger Games” franchise, the movie adaptation of Veronica Roth’s Divergent (HarperCollins, 2011), featuring Hollywood’s latest sweetheart, Shailene Woodley, will be in theaters on March 21, 2014.

John Green’s chair on the set of In the Fault of Our Stars

One of the most celebrated YA novels of 2012, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton), also starring Shailene Woodley (Hazel), began filming last week in Pittsburgh, and the acclaimed author has been excitedly tweeting and Tumbling from the set with updates. He will be making a cameo appearance in the book-to-film about two teen cancer patients who fall in love. Ansel Elgort plays the male lead, Auggie, Nat Wolff is cast as Isaac, his best friend, and it was recently revealed that Laura Dern will play Hazel’s mother. No film release date yet.

Fans of Gayle Forman’s If I Stay (Dutton, 2009) can breathe a sigh of relief. The film, starring Chloë Moretz, was dropped by Summit earlier this year, but it has since been picked up by MGM. The tearjerker—about a girl who has an out-of-body experience following a car accident that puts her in a coma and kills the rest of her family—will be produced by Denise DiNovi and Alison Greenspan of DiNovi Pictures. No release date yet.

And while Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season, just published this month, the first in a projected seven-book fantasy series by 21-year-old recent college graduate, is already building buzz for adult and teen audiences. It was recently chosen as the first Today Show book club selection, and the film rights have been acquired by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish, founders of The Imaginarium production company.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Sequels and more sequels
There’s been lots of casting news for Lionsgate’s final “Hunger Games” installments, based on Suzanne Collins’s books (Scholastic). The studio is currently eyeing Julianne Moore to play President Coin in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Natalie Dormer has been cast in the role of Cressida, while Evan Ross is set to play Messalla, Cressida’s cameraman, and Stef Dawson will step in as Finnick Odair’s love interest, Annie Cresta. In the meantime, fans still have Catching Fire to look forward to, in theaters on November 22, 2013.

The Mortal Instruments: City of Ashes is slated to begin production in the fall with Harald Zwart returning to direct, along with stars Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell. A taste of the sequel was to premiere in Cannes, but general consensus on The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones is still pending.

Already banking on Divergent’s future success as a film, Brian Duffield been commissioned to begin working on the sequel, Insurgent (HarperCollins, 2012).

A dystopian horizon

Directed by Wes Ball, the movie version of James Dashner’s NYT-bestselling The Maze Runner (Delacorte, 2009), about a group of teens trying to survive in an enclosed environment called “The Glade,” is set to premiere in theaters on February 14, 2014. Patricia Clarkson has joined Dylan O’Brien (Thomas) and Kaya Scodelario (Teresa) in the cast as Chancellor Ava Paige.

A film based on Andy Mulligan’s Trash (Random, 2010), seems to be on its way to theaters soon. Rooney Mara (NGO worker named Olivia), Martin Sheen (Father Julliard), and Wagner Moura are now on board. Three street kids—Raphael (Rickson Tevez), Gardo (Eduardo Luis), and Rat (Gabriel Weinstein) live in an unnamed third-world country picking trash, and discover a mysterious bag that triggers a life-changing chain of events. Stephen Daldry is attached as director and Richard Curtis will write the script. Production starts in Rio de Janeiro and it’s already slated for a May 2014 release from Universal.

Many kidlit fans can attest that Lois Lowry’s Newbery-winning The Giver (Houghton, 1993) is the precursor to many of today’s dystopian YAs. Finally, the wheels for a film adaption have been set in motion. Brenton Thwaites will play an aged-up Jonas (the Receiver of memories) and Jeff Bridges is cast as the title character. Meryl Streep is in talks to play the society’s Chief Elder, tasked with assigning roles to the young denizens of a seemingly perfect world. Philip Noyce is attached as director and no release date has been yet announced.

Another pre-Hunger Games may be coming to a theater near you. Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” series (S & S) is possibly in the pipeline again. The Australian author revealed via Twitter in July that Davis Entertainment and Lola VFX are in talks to team up and produce his NYT-best-selling trilogy, which chronicles the adventures of Tally Youngblood, a teen who unravels her “pretty” world’s ugly secrets.

SLJ Best Adult Book for Teens The Age of Miracles (Random, 2012) by Karen Thompson Walker, finally has a director lined up for its highly anticipated movie adaptation: Catherine Hardwicke, of Twilight-fame. River Road Entertainment’s Bill Pohlad will produce and Seth Lochhead is writing the screenplay based on the novel about a teen’s coming of age while the Earth’s rotation has begun to slow down.

Rick Yancey’s The 5^th Wave (Putnam, 2013) is inching closer to the big screen. Tobey Maguire’s production company has acquired the rights, and Oscar-nominated Susannah Grant is adapting the dark novel about Cassie’s struggle to survive on an Earth that is slowly being destroyed by aliens.

Paramount Pictures has acquired rights to Joelle Charbonneau’s The Testing (Houghton Harcourt 2013), a YA novel in which a teen is selected for a United Commonwealth program that selects the best and brightest to become possible leaders of the slowly revitalizing post-war civilization. Very few survive The Testing.

Classic kidlit on screen

Photo by Disney.

Maleficent, the Robert Stromberg-directed Disney film that stars Angelina Jolie as the title character, Elle Fanning as Princess Aurora, and Brenton Thwaites as the prince, will tell the story of Sleeping Beauty from the Queen’s point of view. It is set to release on July 2, 2014.

Jennifer Garner, Steve Carell, Ed Oxenbould, and Bella Thorne have been filming Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, based on the award-winning picture book by Judith Viorst that follows young Alexander through the trials of one very bad day. Coming to theaters on October 10, 2014, the live-action movie is directed Miguel Arteta, and was adapted by Rob Lieber.

The Cinderella fairy tale is also getting another treatment in a film directed by Kenneth Branagh. The star-studded cast includes Lily James as the title character, Richard Madden as Prince Charming, Cate Blanchett as the evil stepmother Lady Tremaine, Helena Bonham Carter as Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Hayley Atwell as Cinderella’s biological mother, and Stellan Skarsgard as the Grand Duke. It’s due in theaters on March 13, 2015.

The classic French novella The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery will get a star-studded cast for its future film animated adaptation.  Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Benicio Del Toro, Mackenzie Foy and Paul Giamatti are already on board to voice characters in sweet story about a pilot who crash-lands in the desert and meets a boy who claims to have fallen to Earth from his home on an asteroid. Bridges will voice the pilot and Cotillard is in talks to take on the part of a rose. Mark Osborne is attached to direct.

Warner Bros. is making a movie based on the Archie comics series. The long-running comic about a teen and his friends set in the fictional Riverdale will be adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and directed by Jason Moore. It will feature the comics’ first openly gay character, Kevin Keller, and rivals for Archie’s heart, Betty and Veronica, among other Riverdale residents.

Warner Bros. is also in final negotiations to pick up the movie rights to the iconic “Encyclopedia Brown” (Penguin) children’s book series for an adaptation to be produced by Roy Lee and Howard David Deutsch. Donald J. Sobol wrote 28 books, from 1963 until his death in 2012, about the intrepid young detective and his friends.

For middle grade moviegoers

Laika Entertainment has scheduled a release date for The Boxtrolls on September 26, 2014, a stop-motion animated film based on Alan Snow’s graphic novel series “The Ratbridge Chronicles” (S & S). Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi have teamed up to direct this project about a boy who allies himself with boxtrolls, cabbageheads, pirates, rats, a retired lawyer, and other silly characters to save the town of Ratbridge from villainous kidnappers. The cast of voice actors includes Elle Fanning, Simon Pegg, Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, and Jared Harris.

Disney has teamed up with the Weinstein Co. to develop a book-to-film adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl (Disney, 2001). The movie will be based on the first two books in the “Artemis Fowl” series, which chronicles the adventures of a 12-year-old criminal millionaire mastermind. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg will handle the script for the live-action film, while Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will producer alongside Weinstein.

In development

Addison Timlin and Jeremy Irvine are set to star in Fallen, an adaptation of Lauren Kate’s best-selling YA series about fallen angels. Produced by Lotus Entertainment and Mayhem Pictures, the film will be directed by Scott Hicks and has been adapted by Kathryn Price, Nicole Millard, and Michael Ross.

Film rights to Emmy Laybourne’s Monument 14 (Feiwel & Friends, 2012) have been acquired by Strange Weather Films. The YA novel focuses on a group of 14 kids who survive an apocalyptic event, and must continue to battle the elements from the shelter of a superstore. Director/Screenwriter Brad Peyton is attached.

Universal Pictures has landed the film rights to Lauren Oliver’s next young adult novel, Panic (2014). Marc Platt will produce the project. The realistic novel is described as Oliver’s return to the grittiness of her first book, Before I Fall (2010, both HarperCollins), which was optioned by Fox 2000.

Ally Carter has two series optioned for film. The rights for “Gallagher Girls” have been acquired by Tonik Productions. These best-selling books share the stories of a group of sexy high-school-aged spies. The “Heist Society” series (both published by Disney/Hyperion) is now with Lionsgate with Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks attached as producers. This series follows a reformed teen thief as she tries to make good and get out of the family con business.

Bryce Clyde Jenkins (from left), Skai Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Wood Harris and Harrison Knight star as the Watson family in the Hallmark Channel movie The Watsons Go to Birmingham. (Photo courtesy of Crown Media)

On the small screen
Christopher Paul Curtis’s 1995 historical fiction novel, The Watsons Go To Birmingham, has been adapted for the Hallmark Channel by Tonya Lewis Lee. Directed by Kenny Leo, the film centers on an African American family living in the town of Flint, Michigan, who visit their grandmother’s home in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, a turbulent time during the civil rights movement. The cast includes: Anika Noni Rose, David Alan Grier, Skai Jackson, LaTanya Richardson, Wood Harris, Bryce Jenkins, Pauletta Washington and Harrison Knight. It will have its world premiere on Friday, September 20 (8pm ET).

Kass Morgan’s The 100 (Little, Brown, 2013), a postapocalyptic YA novel, will premiere as a television series on The CW in its 2013–14 midseason.

Roald Dahl’s 1990 illustrated children’s book, Esio Trot, about elderly lovebirds and tortoises, will be adapted into a movie for the BBC, starring Dustin Hoffman and Dame Judi Dench as the couple. Dearbhla Walsh will direct the project, which starts filming in England next month.

 See also:

Page to Screen: Summer Reading Blockbusters, Dystopian Teen Lit, and Childhood Classics

Page to Screen: Upcoming Kids’ Books Set for Film Adaptations

Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower) tells (Lily Collins) about his childhood in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Photos courtesy of Constantin Film and Unique Features.

The first movie adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s popular urban fantasy series (S & S), The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones takes the opposite approach of “The Twilight Saga.” It emphasizes action above all else, keeping the lingering close-ups of its gooey-eyed, mismatched couple, Brooklyn artsy hipster Clarissa “Clary” Fray (Lily Collins) and the pale and petulant Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower), to a clipped minimum. The producers, who previously made the “Resident Evil” action films, provide the thrill of the chase and a sprinkling of the romance.

The screenplay prowls right through Clare’s story line, covering the first 120 pages of City of Bones (2007) within a half-hour, shuffling through the chronology of events. Sixteen-year-old Clary witnesses a murder in a nightclub that no other clubbers can see, and the next day, her single mom, Jocelyn (Lena Headey, so youthful she could pass as the lead’s older sister), disappears after two thugs break into their apartment. In this knockabout sequence, Jocelyn strikes the towering men with anything she can get her hands on,

Jocelyn is a former Shadowhunter, an angel-human demon slayer, and has been protecting the Mortal Cup, which renegade Shadowhunter Valentine (the smarmy Jonathan Rhys Meyers) covets. Without it, his race is a dying breed.

Knowing that Clary’s life is in danger, Jace—a swaggering Shadowhunter—promises to protect her from Valentine’s army of shape-shifting demons, and to help her find her mom. True to his word, Jace proves to be super-acrobatic, somersaulting in the air and landing firmly on his feet, weapon in hand.

Robert Sheehan as Simon, Clary’s best friend.

So yes, the movie’s dominated by plot instead of Clary’s discovery of her lineage—she’s part-Shadowhunter, after all—with recognizable snatches of the novel heard between the crash-and-boom special effects. The framework of the author’s romantic triangle remains, with Clary’s lovestruck best friend, the nerdy Simon (Robert Sheehan) lagging behind her and her superpowered love interest. Many of the novel’s subplots have also disappeared: Simon is not turned into a rat, for one example.

As it progresses, the movie’s production design doesn’t skimp on the creepiness, and becomes full-on gothic, with scads of skeleton bones . The demonic creatures take after the viscous, multi-jawed creatures of Alien. Yet the movie has a PG-13 intensity with a light touch of camp. Jace delivers his droll putdowns as if it exhausts him, and Clary fights off vampires in a black mini-dress with thigh-high boots, making any Bond girl proud.

However, the logic of Clare’s universe becomes muddled; Valentine simply and bluntly wants to dominate all non-humans. Motivations are abridged to set the scene for the next fight, where a couple of Shadowhunters and a tag-along Clary battle hordes of villains. With the plot pruned down to its essentials, the story’s mixture of myths and legends feels formulaic. In the climactic nocturnal showdown, the editing intercuts three different to-the-death confrontations, each prolonged, with the characters repeating the same moves. The lengthy sequence might prompt viewers to think that only the inevitable daylight will end the battle with rampaging vampires.

Clary and Jace share a lovey-dovey moment.

If this movies does, in fact, launch a franchise, it will be in no small part to the casting of the cool but debonair Campbell Bower as Jace, and for the appeal of Collins as Clary (those lips, those eyes, those eyebrows). In the meantime, it’s a passable late-summer stand-in for its core audience until the new fall CW television season begins.

Directed by Harald Zwart

Rated PG-13

130 min.

Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) engages in a fiery battle. Photo by Murray Close/20th Century Fox Film Corp.

It’s been more than three years since Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the first film installment of Rick Riordan’s ultra-popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series (Hyperion) jumped onto the screen. The half-blood (or demigod) Percy, son of the omnipresent but unseen Poseidon, takes off on another adventure in this visual equivalent of a loud and boisterous amusement ride. In Sea of Monsters, the 17-year-old (Logan Lerman) wants to prove that he’s not a “one-quest wonder,” but this movie franchise-wannabe doesn’t escape that dig. The first film, directed by Chris Columbus, had a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, especially in the teen’s interactions in the real world and his reaction to his very ancient lineage. Ironically, by taking place in a world of monsters and angry gods, Percy comes off as more ordinary this time around.

To recall the back story, viewers might want to have read the source material (or be up on your Greek mythology). Regardless, moviegoers won’t get confused. The characters are basic stock figures: the kid next door; the hapless comic relief of Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), a satyr from the waist down; and the know-it-all Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena. No, you’re not experiencing déjà vu. There are plenty of obvious comparisons to the “Harry Potter” series.

Percy Jackson and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario). Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

The movie’s story has been “a millennium in the making,” as one character intones. Someone, or something, wants to invade and annihilate Camp Half-Blood where Percy and his peers are heroes-in-training. The camp’s protective giant tree has been poisoned, and a bronze bull has been on the attack, so the three sneak out, along with Tyson (Douglas Smith), a Cyclops and Percy’s half-brother, in search of the Golden Fleece, which heals anyone or anything. The fabric has been held hostage by the Cyclops Polyphemus on an island in the middle of the Sea of Monsters, better known as the Bermuda Triangle. Along the way, Hermes (Nathan Fillion) hams it up, and Cronus makes a catastrophic cameo. (Incidentally, Percy is not the only one with distant deity daddy issues.)

The trio’s journey makes the Maze of the Minotaur seem fairly straightforward, and a list of the plot differences between the book and movie would be as long as any web Arachne could weave. (A chariot race, a Pegasus, and Tantalus are among those missing in action.) Everyone is fluent in movie-speak, as in Hermes’ advice to Percy, “One thing I’ve learned in three thousand years, don’t give up on family;” or when the main villain threatens, “The Olympians who scorned us will know death.” Percy also gets into the act: “I make my own destiny.” But like the book, the saga moves at a clipped, out-of-breath pace, and the work of the 3D special effects team adds a jolt of energy when the creepy and cranky creatures are on the rampage.

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

In the books, Percy has to figure out what to do or how to solve the meaning of his many premonitions. On screen, he and his cohorts are more reactive, pawns of the gods, really. They are quick on their feet, but none of them have special powers or abilities except for what has been given to them by the Olympians, like a mystical tape gun or a ball-point pen that turns into a retractable sword. Percy is even told the coordinates to find the island. How can Percy really be a hero if he is given the devices or is told what to do? He’s not saving the gods, the gods are saving him.

Directed by Thor Freudenthal

Rated PG

106 min.

Opens nationwide August 7.

Aimee (Shailene Woodley) and Sutter (Miles Teller). Photos courtesy of A24 Films

Director James Ponsoldt’s sharp take on Tim Tharp’s 2008 novel (Knopf) gives The Spectacular Now a higher level of maturity and complexity than most young adult book-to-movie adaptations. Party boy and high school senior Sutter Keely (the very affable Miles Teller) lives for the moment. He can smooth talk his way past a bar doorman or charm a teacher when he doesn’t turn in homework. Whether it’s 10 a.m. or in the middle of the day, it’s never too early for a buzz—he keeps his flask filled and in his back pocket. After being dumped by his girlfriend, Cassidy, the teen parties hard and wakes up passed out on a stranger’s front yard. Sutter comes to when he’s wakened up by a girl his age.

Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley, in full plain-Jane mode) knows Sutter’s name, but she’s only vaguely familiar to him; they don’t travel in the same social circles. He has no idea where his car is, so he accompanies his Good Samaritan, on her early morning paper route (no, it’s not a period piece) to search for it. Major manga-fan Aimee is a clean slate: she doesn’t cuss, has never had a boyfriend, and has only one friend. (And, she’s not exactly trendy: she has unicorn figurines in her bedroom.)

As their relationship starts to change, the class clown continuously deflects the truth, telling his best friend, who sees Aimee as a “strange choice for a rebound,” that he just wants her to tutor him in geometry. Yet, Sutter asks her out to a party in the woods, where she takes a sip from his offered flask—her first taste of alcohol. He rationalizes that he just wants to help Aimee increase her confidence, treating her like a pet project, with little thought of the repercussions.

The director’s attention to well-rounded, non-stereotypical characterization is spread evenly throughout the ensemble. A noteworthy example is how the film treats Cassidy, the pretty, popular, and blonde ex-girlfriend. It would have been easy to cast her as a shallow harpy, but the script gives actress Brie Larson an opportunity to flesh out the character. In a wistful scene, Cassidy gropes for words to explain what she wants from a boyfriend, finally getting out that ultimately, Sutter comes up short.

Habitually slouching with her arms crossed in front of her, Aimee’s the self-effacing and shy girl-next-door type. However, she’s not exactly a positive influence on Sutter, but an acquiescing enabler. She persistently ingratiates herself to him, joining in drink after drink.

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, known for (500) Days of Summer, boil down Tharp’s novel, in which Sutter’s gift of gab and his justifications for always having 7UP and whisky at the ready take center stage. Neustadter and Weber whittle down the story line to focus it on his mentorship-turned-romance with Aimee. The book’s extraneous characters and digressions won’t be missed.

Though his narrative voice is less wise and grown-up than on the page (where he’s a big Dean Martin fan), on screen Sutter speaks more like an average 17-year-old ‘Joe’. Tharp set his story around Oklahoma City, but the movie could take place in any leafy suburb with a Kmart and a KFC lining the main drag. The biggest departure between the two is that the movie suddenly wraps things up as Sutter takes an initiative towards sobriety. It’s an abrupt move considering how everything else has unfolded in stages. It is only at this point  that the movie spells out its themes.

The film will likely draw viewers to the book, and conversely, this adaptation will bring attention to director Ponsoldt’s earlier film, Smashed, which was equally alcohol soaked, about an elementary school teacher taking the wobbly road towards a booze-free life. Both movies could be considered versions of Days of Wine and Roses for millennials. The Spectacular Now would also make an ideal double feature with the equally smart and hip The Perks of Being a Wallflower. These two adaptations (along with the sadly little-seen Fat Kid Rules the World), have proven that there’s more to YA movies than magic potions or dystopia. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on August 2, and nationwide on August 23.

Director: James Ponsoldt

Rated R

95 minutes (bluer than The Perks of Being a Wallflower but tame compared to cable TV)

They may be young, but teacher Arturo Avina’s talented kindergarteners are already celebrities in their own right. Students at the Los Angeles Unified School District Olympic Primary Center are the stars of a short-film adaptation of Harry G. Allard Jr.’s beloved children’s classic Miss Nelson Is Missing (Houghton Mifflin, 1977). Over the course of two months, Avina directed the youngsters, filmed the scenes, and, with the help of the budding actors, edited the movie with technology available in most classrooms. The video uses songs by Garbage, Bjork, Blondie, and Madonna to emphasize the story’s montages, and the class can be heard on the background as part of the soundtrack.

Inspired by a similar experience from his elementary school years, Avina embarked on the project with a script he had written while working at a previous school. Each scene had to be shot separately, with the bulk of it being completed during recess and after school.

Even though there was a script already in place, the students had a large say in how each scene was filmed, what lines they chose to make their own, and how they wanted to portray their characters. “Even though I gave up all my breaks to work on this project, it was well worth it to see how their oral language skills improved, and how it gave them something to look forward to every day,” Avina tells School Library Journal.

The video was a collaborative effort, with support from the principal, teachers, students, and parents. “I would sometimes assign difficult lines as homework, or parents would have to stay after school until kids were done for the day,” Avina says. “Even in the editing process, I ran it by the kids each time. We would play with different camera views, effects, and filters. We would discuss how we wanted our story to begin and end. I tried to expose them to the process and let them give as much input as they could.”

The tools that Avina and his class used to create the film weren’t that out of the ordinary. With only a new video camera, the iMovie and Garage Band software found on any Apple computer, and his iPhone for recording the children’s singing voices, they created their musical production. Using Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media channels, Avina promoted the film to networks of teachers and librarians. It caught the attention of the media and education leaders, such as SLJ blogger Betsy Bird, and teacher-librarian Shannon Miller.

Miller contacted Avina via Twitter and arranged a Q&A Skype session between her own kindergarten students in Van Meter, IA, and his class. “One of the reasons why I reached out to him to connect with our class was because I wanted his kids to take ownership of their great accomplishment,” Miller tells SLJ. “It was really sweet to talk to them and how they worked together and thought of their ideas.”

Arturo Avina

Though the schools are almost 2,000 miles apart, the students shared much in common. “We’re a very rural school in the middle of cornfields, so many of my students haven’t ever been anywhere else,” Miller says. “And it’s the same thing for Art’s kids. Though they’re in a busy city like Los Angeles, they’re just as isolated as we are. He’s given a lot to his kids by connecting them to people on the other side of the country.”

The two classes have also done some collaborative brainstorming and storytime together, and they plan to exchange even more ideas via Skype, including a Tux Paint art project that Miller’s kindergarten class has already begun. She explains, “We have to continue to share and promote stories like this one. A story of how we as teachers can empower kids and help them find their voice and tools to connect with kids all over the world.”

Don’t miss this new video with outtakes and bloopers from Avina’s original Mrs. Nelson film.

Illustration by Anthony Freda.

I’m on my way to visit Susan Cooper on an unseasonably warm day in mid-February. As my car cruises along, about 45 minutes south of Boston, low tide reveals miles of untouched marshland. I drive across a short causeway, creep down an unpaved lane, and suddenly I’m staring at the exquisite home that Cooper built a couple of years ago. My first thought is that I’ve stumbled upon the Grey House, the setting of Cooper’s first children’s book, Over Sea, Under Stone. With its soaring cathedral ceilings and wraparound windows that frame the wetlands, the space is filled with warmth and light even on a winter’s day. It seems like the perfect place for the 77-year-old writer to conjure up some more of her magic.

In June, Cooper will receive the 2012 Margaret A. Edwards Award, an annual lifetime achievement honor sponsored by SLJ and administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association. It’s about time. Cooper’s books have beguiled young readers for more than 40 years, and the award committee singled out for praise her most popular work, “The Dark Is Rising,” an epic, five-volume fantasy series comprised of Over Sea, Under Stone (1966); The Dark Is Rising (1973); Greenwitch (1974); The Grey King(1975); and Silver on the Tree (1977, all S & S/Margaret K. McElderry Bks.). The settings are contemporary England and Wales, and Cooper draws on Celtic and Arthurian legends to portray 11-year-old Will Stanton and his friends as they struggle against the terrifying powers of darkness. The series features two of Cooper’s trademarks—beautiful writing and superb storytelling—and if you haven’t read it, be forewarned: once you start, it’s nearly impossible to put down.

Cooper was born and raised in Buckinghamshire, in southeast England. While working as a reporter and feature writer in London for The Sunday Times, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, she spent her spare time writing Over Sea, Under Stone, which quickly caught the attention of legendary American editor Margaret K. McElderry. The two became lifelong friends and worked together on the “Dark Is Rising” series and many other books. Cooper began to write screenplays in the early 1980s with actor Hume Cronyn, and the two married in 1996.

I talked to Cooper about her remarkable journey as a writer, and later, with her daughter Kate, we looked at some of McElderry’s photographs and papers. As executor of her late editor’s will, Cooper was getting ready to ship the collection to its new home at Princeton University’s Cotsen Children’s Library.

What did you like to read as a child?

Assorted folktales and myths, I think—and John Masefield’s The Box of Delights was the enchanted room that I could go into and shut the door. I read E. Nesbit and Arthur Ransome, but this was wartime, so I was driven to what was on my parents’ shelves, and that included a 20-volume set of Dickens in very small print. Bad for my eyes, but very good for my sense of story.

What did you study in college?

I went to Oxford, Somerville College, and did a degree in English language and literature. We had lectures by C. S. Lewis on Renaissance literature, and Tolkien on Beowulf—he’d always start his series with a great shout of “Hwaet!” in guttural Anglo-Saxon. The two of them managed to halt the Oxford English syllabus at 1832, so there was a huge emphasis on early works by Spenser, Chaucer, Sir Gawain, the mystery plays, Malory and all his sources, above all Shakespeare. I soaked it all up like a sponge; I didn’t miss the Victorians a bit.

Were you working on your own stories?

I was already writing short stories. I edited the university newspaper, and decided a writer could only earn a living in journalism, so I went knocking on doors on Fleet Street and was lucky enough to get a job as a reporter on The Sunday Times—initially for Ian Fleming, who had a column called “Atticus.” Ian had just started writing the James Bond books; he was tall and handsome, with sexy hooded eyes, and a long cigarette holder in which he smoked far too many cigarettes. I was scared stiff of him because he was so sophisticated, but he was lovely. So was my life as a reporter, interviewing anyone from dockers to prime ministers and stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. Great training for a writer, all that variety.

I lived alone and wrote in the evenings. I wrote a heavily autobiographical novel and an agent told me I should think of it as “apprentice writing”; and although I wanted to kill him, he was absolutely right. So I wrote a futuristic adult novel called Mandrake, and after that I found that Ernest Benn, who had published the E. Nesbit books, was offering a prize of £1,000 for “a family adventure story.” I hadn’t intended to write children’s books, but since I was earning about £800 a year at the time, this sounded great.

Tell us a little about the story.

I invented three children, Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew, and put them on a train to Cornwall, where they were met by a tall uncle with gray hair, their Great-Uncle Merriman. But by chapter three the book had become a fantasy, with Merriman as a Merlin figure, so it became useless for the competition. I didn’t care, I was having such a good time with it. Everything I was soaked in starting pouring into the book—the early literature, the Arthurian legends. I called it Over Sea, Under Stone. It was published by Jonathan Cape, but by that time I was living in America.

Why did you move here?

My newspaper sent me here for four months in 1962. I met a professor of metallurgy at MIT called Nicholas Grant, 20 years older than me, and he started turning up in London. We were married in 1963, to my editor’s horror, and off I went at 28 to be the stepmother of three teenagers in Massachusetts.

Did you keep writing?

I went on writing, but mostly nonfiction—first a book about the USA, Behind the Golden Curtain, which led to the only time I shall ever have my picture in Time magazine. They hated the book. Then a biography of the English writer J. B. Priestley, who was an old friend.

How did you meet Margaret McElderry?

Margaret had bought the American rights for Over Sea, Under Stone from Cape, so we’d corresponded. I wrote a novel called The Camp, based on my wartime childhood, but my agent couldn’t sell it. I sent it to Margaret and asked what was wrong with it, and she wrote back, “Nothing, but it’s a children’s book, and I want to publish it.” So we met for lunch in a Greenwich Village restaurant with a tree growing up out of its basement area, which I shall never forget, and she published the book as Dawn of Fear.

You wrote The Dark Is Rising, the second title in the series, eight years after the first book. That’s a long hiatus. What made you pick up the story again?

Nick and I were cross-country skiing one day in the woods, branches sticking up out of the snow looking like buried antlers, and I suddenly wanted to write a book set in snow like that, but in England, about an 11-year-old boy who wakes up one day and finds he can work magic. Sitting up in my study in Winchester, Massachusetts, for some reason I reread Over Sea, Under Stone, and I thought, Hey, this new story is linked to Over Sea—and Merriman is in it—and there are five books… And I wrote down the next four titles, four very rough outlines, and the last half page of the very last book, which I actually used when I got to Silver on the Tree. The next six years were wonderful, professionally. I knew where I was going.

I was very homesick, and every inch of The Dark Is Rising is where I grew up. Sometimes I sat in the sunny British Virgin Islands, where we had a little holiday house, writing about snowy Buckinghamshire. It doesn’t matter where you are geographically, of course, because you’re living in the landscape of your mind.

Did you send Margaret ideas for books or finished projects?

I don’t send things till I think they’re finished, but I never know whether a manuscript is any good. With The Dark Is Rising I sent her a nervous letter saying, “This is a very weird book, I’m afraid, it’s called The Gift of Gramarye and it’s rather long.” She wrote back saying that she loved it, but that we should change the title in case children thought it was about grammar. My editor at Chatto and Windus in England told me that The Dark Is Rising was the longest book they had ever published. It was only 216 pages—imagine.

Of course, fantasy novels weren’t the flavor du jour back then.

Margaret was a wonderful, supportive editor. We trusted each other. We did have huge battles about punctuation, and I drive copy editors mad to this day. I punctuate as if the prose were music, for the rhythm and sound of it. So when proofs came from Margaret with commas and semicolons altered, I put them all back again. Margaret would sigh and say, “Have it your way.”

Before long we became close personal friends. I miss her. She would sometimes turn something down, but if she knew there was a book I wanted to write, she would wait until I had finished it. She had an almost mystical respect for the imagination, and that gave her writers tremendous artistic freedom. “Whatever time you need,” she would say.

You’ve also written adult books, essays, short stories, and screenplays. You’ve never allowed yourself to become pigeonholed.

I was, and am, happiest writing the books published for children, but, well, I was just a writer. We were in the British Virgin Islands after The Dark Is Rising came out, and I was told I had a phone call. So I got in my little boat and went over to the island that had a phone, and Barbara Rollock at ALA told me thatThe Dark Is Rising was the only Honor book for the Newbery Medal. I’d never even heard of the Newbery Medal. I went back and said to Nick, “Nothing important—my book just missed winning some prize.” Then Margaret called, so I went back in my boat and she told me the facts of life.

The Dark Is Rising was the only Newbery Honor winner in 1974, and two years later, The Grey King won the Newbery. Suddenly, loads of people wanted to talk to you, but you rather adroitly avoided them.

I’m a shy person—if I’d been born more outgoing I’d have rejoiced in the talking. After Nicholas and I split in 1980, I was on my own with joint custody of our two children, Jonathan and Kate, and I needed to earn more money than children’s books will give you. But I didn’t have to go on the road because I became a screenwriter, by accident. I’d met the actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and after I finished Silver on the Tree Hume and I collaborated on a play for the two of them, called Foxfire, set in Appalachia. Hume was making a film with Jane Fonda and she read the play. One day when I was visiting the set she said, “Have you ever read a book by Harriette Arnow called The Dollmaker?”

I said, “How funny, my editor’s been trying to get me to read that for years.”

So Margaret didn’t disapprove when Jane hired Hume and me to write a screenplay from that wonderful big Appalachian novel. I enjoyed it; respectful adaptation of a novel is carpentry, reshaping an existing story for the new medium. I did rewrite the ending, which made me deeply nervous until Jane got a letter from Ms. Arnow saying, “The ending seems to me entirely natural.” The Dollmakerbecame a three-hour TV film; Jane got an Emmy, Hume and I won the Humanitas Prize and an Emmy nomination. So everyone thought I was a screenwriter, and for the next 10 years I wrote screenplays and children’s books alternately, and was solvent.

You also did some writing for baritone and early music pioneer John Langstaff and his Christmas Revels, which are now performed worldwide.

Yes. Margaret was also Jack’s editor, and one Christmas when she was staying with us we went to the magical, myth-haunted Revels and she took us backstage. Jack shook my hand and said, “But I’ve read your books! You should be writing for the Revels!” So I did, for the next 20 years—songs, plays, poems, you name it. Jack was a marvel—I miss him, too. Candlewick just published a book I wrote about him called The Magic Maker.

But the books were my real love, all this time—my two Boggart books, which were great fun, a string of picture books, one of them with my dear friend Ashley Bryan, and most recently two time-shift fantasies, King of Shadows and Victory. Margaret had retired, so I worked on Victory with Emma Dryden, equally happily.

What compels you to write?

Telling a story—that’s what we’re all about, isn’t it? Every chapter should make you want to know what happens in the next. A novel is a necklace of linked beads. Just the way it was for the earliest storytellers, trying to keep the audience listening around the fire and not wandering off.

What does winning prizes like the Edwards mean to you?

I have mixed feelings about prizes, because the choice is inevitably subjective and there are always a dozen other books or people equally deserving. But I’m deeply grateful. It changes your life, that wonderful reassurance that you’re doing the right thing and that you know how to do it. An award is a life belt; in any rough seas, you have it thereafter, keeping you afloat.

So can we hope to see another book soon?

It’s called Ghost Hawk, I just finished it. I haven’t a clue whether it’s any good.