If there’s one thing that the TV networks, Hollywood studios and mass media conglomerates of the past decade have loved, it’s an adaptation. No Disney cartoon seems immune to the fate— some may say curse— of the live-action remake, no midcentury gang of clever teens is too outdated or preachy to get a dark, drippy and poorly-lit reboot that proceeds to devour CW schedules for 12 years while making progressively less and less sense, and no dark and irreverent comic book series is too obscure to be dragged up for three seasons, a terrible finale, and if it’s lucky a failed one- or even two-season spinoff. Even the fairy tales and classic novels of old aren’t safe—far from it. It would seem as though, in their endless hunger to make profit through adaptation, there are very increasingly few pieces of fictional media that haven’t had at least a pilot episode’s worth of airtime. However, there is one stone left, somewhat inexplicably, unturned: the absolute wealth of unique, creative, and daring children’s and young-adult fantasy tales that proliferated across school libraries and the more out-of-the-way shelves at Barnes & Noble during the 2000s and early 2010s.
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These stories are no 2020s-esque Faerie romances, nor are they members of the formulaic YA dystopia boom that battled them for shelf space, nor do they quite fit within the subgenre of thoughtful, whimsical and empowering all-ages sword-and-sorcery novels that spanned the 1970s all the way to the early 2000s. Closest in tone to the likes of Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl (the latter of which recently joined the former in getting its own brand-new onscreen reboot), these fantasy books— some series, some trilogies, and some standalone— took inspiration from sources as widely varying as Celtic folklore, Egyptian Magical Papyri, contemporary youth fashion trends, magical-girl anime, real-life history, and the earliest stirrings of the Solarpunk and natural-medicine movements. If you read these books growing up, you very well might not remember them, but the imprint they left on your psyche no doubt remains to this day. In an era where it seems like everything has been adapted to exhaustion, these masterpieces are overdue for their time in the spotlight.
Avalon: Web of Magic
Starting out with a forgotten gem of 2000s fantasy, we have Avalon: Web of Magic. Three ordinary schoolgirls, Emily Fletcher, Adriane Charday, and Kara Davies, discover that their local wildlife preserve is actually a refuge for lost magical creatures such as aquatic dragons and mistwolves. The trio find out that they are mages— humans with the ability to access the Web of Magic that connects Earth to a vast network of fantastical realms.
With the help of their bonded talking animals and magical jewels, Emily, Adriane and Kara search for the lost realm of Avalon, the home of all magic, and use its power to repair the Web of Magic— all while being menaced by the twisted and mysterious Dark Sorceress, who would use Avalon’s power to her own ends… and on top of all this, they still have to deal with the regular teenage woes of high school, boys, shopping, and family issues! Altogether, this series would go on to span 12 books in a wildly twisty saga, with the trio facing challenges that tested their bonds both as friends and as Mages. With its richly detailed world, darker moments that could stray into both the uncanny and the tear-jerking, and an aesthetic dripping with true 2000s fairycore whimsy, Avalon: Web of Magic is perfectly set for an onscreen iteration.
Lionboy
An Earth ravaged by the worst-case scenarios of climate crisis and corporate greed serves as the background for a sci-fantasy thriller full of joy, wonder, and hope in the Lionboy trilogy, written by a mother-daughter duo writing under the nom de plume of Zizou Corder. For 10-ish-year-old Charlie Ashanti, the trilogy’s magically-gifted protagonist, the quiet, storm-scoured coast of England, where the dramatically raised tideline and encroaching rivers are dotted by practical, unglamorous sustainable technology— clearly created out of necessity rather than from the allure of innovation— is simply where he grew up, and is described with all the charm and innocence of any child unaware of the tumultuous past of his hometown.
Charlie travels south across Europe in search of his kidnapped parents— an English professor of herbal medicine and a Ghanian scientist/botanist, whose combined fields of research had accidentally imbued Charlie with the power to speak to cats. As he travels across a world that many people today imagine amid their worst fears, Charlie sees the ruined cities, and the various bright and creative ways that humankind has adapted to the fresh instability of their surroundings, with nothing but wonder and delight (the portion of the series set in Venice, especially, shows the strange beauty of a sinking world seen through a child’s eyes). As the title suggests, Charlie is joined fairly quickly by a family of lions he liberates from an eccentric yet cruel circus, and their adventures through the next three books tackle themes of climate apocalypse, human trafficking, found family, animal rights, and the greed of pharmaceutical corporations. These are pretty heavy themes for a series aimed at, at oldest, 8th-graders, butLionboy manages to treat its subject matter with respect and honesty while never getting too dark for a kids’ series or losing sight of the wonder at its core.
While Lionboy has gotten a live-action adaptation— of a sort— in the form of a 2013-15 touring stage show adaptation by British theatre company Complicité, it has not yet made it to the screen— and the hope, wonder, honesty, wildly-designed infrastructure, colorful characters, and talking cats it has to offer would make it a truly lovely sight to see right about now.
Witch & Wizard
When teenage siblings Whit & Wisteria “Wisty” Allgood are awakened in the middle of the night by armed police, they’re confused and terrified— feelings that hardly decrease as they learn that, following a sudden global takeover by the anti-art, anti-music, generally anti-creativity, and definitely anti-magic New Order (unsubtly abbreviated as N.O.), their entire family is being arrested under suspicion of witchcraft. While this is bizarre enough on its own for the previously unremarkable pair, things only get stranger as, separated from their parents and locked in a dingy cell, Whit and Wisty begin to discover that they do truly have magical powers. Breaking out and joining a resistance movement of newly-socially-sanctioned teens hiding out in an abandoned Macy’s-like superstore — living out, simultaneously, the teenage fantasies of being part of an underground rebellion against a dictatorial government, and of living 24/7 in the mall.
The ensuing dystopian fantasy sticks well within the Teen Rebellion genre while exploring Whit and Wisty’s powers, taking the duo and their friends on raids to free prisoners from the N.O., and on treacherous quests across a misty afterlife known as the Shadowland, with equal frequency (and often doing both at the same time, as Whit and Wisty use travel through the Shadowland as a rather ill-advised getaway option). While the first book is more than enough material for a solid miniseries, the Witch & Wizard series does stretch on for several more books, and while the narrative seems to get a bit tired towards the last two, there’s definitely the potential for a longer-running series here. Witch & Wizard— penned by the prolific James Patterson, by the way— is overall a solidly enjoyable fusion of the Dystopian and Fantasy genres, and would adapt perfectly for television.
The Scorpio Races
Sometime in the early 20th century, somewhere in the North Sea between Scotland and Ireland, the young men of the (fictitious) island of Thisby race supernatural, bloodthirsty Water Horses— the Capaill Uisce (pronounced “Cap-ayll Ishka” for those not versed in Celtic languages, singular form “Capall Uisce”) — along the beach in an annual November tradition that, while it has now become a tourist attraction, barely hides its roots as a pre-Christian blood sacrifice to the island’s horse goddess. If that isn’t enough to make you immediately beg for a miniseries, there’s the fact that this is the only entry on this list that will scare the absolute pants off of you— the Capaill Usice are written with biology and behavior that is both biologically-accurate enough to feel real, and unnatural enough to trigger a truly primal sort of fear.
Fear factor aside, there’s the socio-economic commentary, as the Races’ role as a tourist attraction on sparse, rocky Thisby makes the bloody event the island’s means of income and survival, with Thisby’s economy in constant tension with its dependence on the morbid interest of wealthy outsiders— and the willingness of its residents to accommodate and satisfy that curiosity amidst a festival was sacred to them long before the first churches were built on the island. The Races’ pagan elements are never treated with disrespect, fear or gawking, despite how easy it would be in a story like this— the characters exist in quiet connection to, and awe of, the ancientness of their surroundings, and when the ancient ritual aspects of the Races show blatantly through the modern trappings of quaint festivity, the narrator and characters alike treat them with reverence.
Despite the horror of the Capaill Uisce and the incomprehensible, maybe-really-there presence of Thisby’s Horse Goddess, if this story has a true villain it is the greed and exploitation that humankind takes out on each other and on the world around them— even the malevolent piebald Capall whose threatening presence looms throughout the book was only brought into the realm of humankind through a series of acts of selfish, uncaring greed. Throughout this, The Scorpio Races carries a visceral, earthy autumnal mood that makes you swear you can smell the sea salt and hear the gulls crying, and feel the scrubby grass and rocks underfoot as you follow both the story’s star-crossed young lovers— oh, did I mention this is a romance? — on their respective paths about the island. If there were ever a book that needs to be a movie or miniseries, which then needs to become an annual autumn viewing tradition, it’s The Scorpio Races.
Read this novel if you want to be too scared to go out at night for fear you’ll encounter a horse.
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