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Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children Series is Coming to Television!

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Margaret Kingsbury

Contributing Editor

Margaret Kingsbury grew up in a house so crammed with books she couldn’t open a closet door without a book stack tumbling, and she’s brought that same decorative energy to her adult life. Margaret has an MA in English with a concentration in writing and has worked as a bookseller and adjunct English professor. She’s currently a freelance writer and editor, and in addition to Book Riot, her pieces have appeared in School Library Journal, BuzzFeed News, The Lily, Parents, StarTrek.com, and more. She particularly loves children’s books, fantasy, science fiction, horror, graphic novels, and any books with disabled characters. You can read more about her bookish and parenting shenanigans in Book Riot’s twice-weekly The Kids Are All Right newsletter. You can also follow her kidlit bookstagram account @BabyLibrarians, or on Twitter @AReaderlyMom.

The Wayward Children novella series by Seanan McGuire will be coming to the small screen, picked up by SyFy and Legendary Television. Joe Tracz will adapt the first book–Every Heart a Doorway–and serve as showrunner. With multiple book adaptations, including the Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief musical and the A Series of Unfortunate Events TV series, he seems like an excellent choice to adapt this YA, fantasy novella series published by Tor.com.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuireFor those of you unfamiliar with the series, imagine if all the stories about entering a doorway into another world–Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia–were true. And then imagine the teenager who enters that door and lives the perfect magical experience of their dreams being thrust back into our reality. How strange that teenager will seem to their family. How lonely and lost they would be. Enter Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school that serves as a home for those waiting and hoping for their doors to open once more. In Book One, there’s a murderer loose in the school. New student Nancy is a prime suspect since she hails from the halls of the dead. Can she figure out who the real killer is?

The series consists of four novellas:

Every Heart a Doorway

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Beneath the Sugar Sky

In an Absent Dream

This award-winning series is diverse and fun and sure to be an amazing TV series. I’ve been listening to them all on audio, so if you haven’t read them yet, I can recommend the audiobooks.