Today is Disney+ Day, which means the streamer is announcing a whole host of trailers, release dates, and other promotional mayhem—including word that a series adaptation of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s beloved Spiderwick Chronicles is in the works!
The five-book series follows the adventures of three siblings who discover a secret world of fairies in a run-down estate called Spiderwick.
There are five main Spiderwick books and a three-book spinoff series and several companion books. If you feel like maybe you’ve seen all this somewhere before, maybe you did: There was a Spiderwick Chronicles movie in 2008, which starred Mary-Louise Parker as Helen Grace, and Sarah Bolger and Freddie Highmore as her children (Highmore played twins Jared and Simon).
Buy the Book
![Where the Drowned Girls Go](https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/where-the-drowned-girls-go.jpg)
![Where the Drowned Girls Go](https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/where-the-drowned-girls-go.jpg)
Where the Drowned Girls Go
The summary for the first book, The Field Guide, puts the premise succinctly:
After finding a mysterious, handmade field guide in the attic of the ramshackle old mansion they’ve just moved into, Jared; his twin brother, Simon; and their older sister, Mallory, discover that there’s a magical and maybe dangerous world existing parallel to our own—the world of faerie.
The Grace children want to share their story, but the faeries will do everything possible to stop them…
Black has, of course, written a lot of books involving faeries, from her debut novel Tithe to her recent Folk of the Air series, all of which would make excellent series. So here’s hoping Disney’s Spiderwick Chronicles takes off, and that this is just the beginning of a Holly Black cinematic universe (make a Doll Bones movie, Disney! C’mon!).
No further details have been announced just yet.
Your field guide to a world of fantasy. #TheSpiderwickChronicles, a new live-action Original Series based on the best-selling books, is coming to #DisneyPlus. #DisneyPlusDay pic.twitter.com/AbDkEPntZV
— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) November 12, 2021
This post should be accompanied by the song “Loved By the Sun” by Tangerine Dream and Jon Anderson.
Jeff, could you take a look at this phrase and see if you can edit for better sense? I had trouble with it at first.
“what Ilúvatar hold told the Ainur”
Research Flat Arda
@2, definitely a typo on my part. Corrected now:
Sorry, just posting as I go: Do you want to catch this one too?
‘so up Tiligon goes into “the realm of the stars” ‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoeoA0Tss0w
The past is behind you; the future’s begun
Say the Children of the Sun
Hah! The Folksmen! Well I see your “Children of the Sun” and I offer instead “Children of the Sun.”
Nice! I don’t think I’d heard that one before.
The Valar go from smothering one set of Children to total hands off the other, nothing in between. Maybe they’re not wrong. Men do not belong to their World and are not bound by their Music. Our spirits come from Eru’s hand gifted with the power that Morgoth longed for, the power to make his own kind of Music. No wonder he hates our guts. No wonder Valar and Elves find us scary. We have the power to destroy Arda – or to heal it. And nobody knows which it will be.
When we read of the Valar sitting motionless in their Circle while their thoughts dart back and forth I can’t help thinking forward some 7500 years to when Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond are heading home after their home-invasion of poor innocent Maeron:
“Often long after the hobbits were wrapped in sleep they would sit together under the stars, recalling the ages that were gone and all their joys and labours in the world, or holding council, concerning the days to come. If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro.”