Renée Ahdieh’s YA fantasy duology The Wrath and the Dawn is in the works as a TV series! Deadline reports that rights have been optioned by 1212 Entertainment, the company that brought us last year’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Ahdieh’s series, a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights, focuses on a girl named Shahrzad, who aims to avenge her best friend’s death at the hands of her country’s ruler. USA Today called it “a riveting Game of Thrones meets Arabian Nights love story.”
Here’s the summary from the publisher:
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The Wrath & the Dawn
Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi’s wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend.
She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.
The Wrath & the Dawn, book one of the duology, was recently named one of TIME’s 100 Greatest Fantasy Novels Ever Written. Both Wrath and its sequel, The Rose & the Dagger, were New York Times bestsellers.
1212 Entertainment is on a bit of a YA adaptation binge; last year, the company also acquired rights to Erin A. Craig’s novel House of Salt and Sorrows, a reimagining of the Brothers Grimm story “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
Image of Ahdieh falls under CC BY-SA 4.0
