There Is Going To Be A SCORPIO RACES Movie And It’s Going To Be So Weird
Maggie Stiefvater has become one of my favorite YA authors. She writes modern mythology, and it's all so rich and textural and totally, completely weird. I just recently finished Blue Lily, Lily Blue, the third book in her Raven Boys quadrilogy (the fourth is yet to be published), and as I was reading it I kept marveling that a series like this exists, and that it's marketed to teenagers.
She writes beautifully, with such a powerful use of language, and she also knows precisely how to capture that messy, over-confident, enraging, gorgeous feeling of being a teenage girl. (She writes boys, too, but I can't quite speak to how well she captures them. They seem a little more eloquent than any of the boys of my own high school acquaintance.) But with the poetry and the prose of teenage life she mixes in this extraordinary Welsh and Celtic mythology, stuff like buried kings and ley lines and magical forests and terrifying, man-eating water horses.
That last is the focus of The Scorpio Races, Stiefvater's standalone 2011 novel, which won the Michael L. Printz Award Honor. This book is completely strange and totally groovy. Here's a synopsis:
It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die.
At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them.
Puck Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio Races. But fate hasn't given her much of a choice. So she enters the competition - the first girl ever to do so. She is in no way prepared for what is going to happen.
And Focus Features is making a film of it! British playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne (How I Live Now, A Long Way Down) will adapt the book for the screen, and it will be produced by KatzSmith Productions and Jay Ireland. No word on a director yet, and I'm eager to hear who will take the helm, but Thorne is a strong choice already for screenwriter.
I just cannot wait to see these water horses, called capaill uisce in the book and in Celtic lore, brought to life onscreen. I can't wait to see the tiny, windswept, mythic island of Thisby overrun by monstrous flesh-eating beasts. This movie is going to be WEIRD, and I am into it.
