Leigh Bardugo‘s popular fantasy novel series Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows are coming to the small-screen. According to Deadline, Netflix has ordered an eight-episode series based on the books from writer Eric Heisser, who is coming off the megawatt success of Bird Box, which he adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel of the same name. The series will be produced by Shawn Levy, who also brought us Stranger Things. All of the ingredients for a new breakout hit seem to be in place for Shadow and Bone, which is the show’s title, though it will be an adaptation of both book series. Bardugo took to Twitter to express her emotion over the adaptation, which she says has been in the works for “a long while.”
I’ll be honest… I’m pretty emotional right now. This has been in the works for a long while, but it didn’t seem real until I got to share it with you. And now I’m very blotchy.
â Leigh Bardugo (@LBardugo) January 10, 2019
Shadow and Bone is the first novel in the Grisha trilogy, followed by Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising. The YA series is centered on Alina Starkov, an orphaned teenage girl who lives in the Russia-like land of Ravka and who possesses the ability to summon light. She is trained by the Grisha, Ravka’s military elite, whose main objective is to destroy the Shadow Fold, a dark stripe of land that contains uncontrollable monsters.
Six of Crows, part of a duology with the book Crooked Kingdom, is set in the same Grisha-verse as Shadow and Bone, though it tells an entirely different story and is set in the Amsterdam-esque city of Ketterdam. No word yet how the Netflix series will marry the two separate series, as they’re also set in different time frames, but Heisser has an impressive track record (he also wrote the screenplay for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival) and a skill for adaptation, which puts Shadow and Bone high on our list of anticipated new series.
Images: Square Fish