50 YA Books We Want Adapted to the Big or Small Screen

Cover to Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce. Image via Random House Books for Young Readers.

40. Song of the Lioness

Tamora Pierce has written many a fantasy novel, but when it comes to her linked series, I think it would be best to start at the very beginning. (Someone once said it was a very good place to start, and when that someone is Julie Andrews singing it at you in The Sound of Music, you should probably listen.)

Starting with the perhaps-not-so-well-named Alanna: The First Adventure, the Song of the Lioness series follows the start of a new legend in the kingdom of Tortall. Young Alanna really doesn’t want to go and study magic, although she has The Gift. Her twin brother, Thom, doesn’t want to go learn to be a knight. The solution? Swap places, and let Alanna become Alan.

When she arrives, she makes friends with all kinds, including a thief and his healer mother, other sons of the nobility, as well as the prince of the realm himself. Not all of them know she’s a girl.

Song of the Lioness helped kick off a series of smaller connected series that now clocks in at 21 books, counting the unpublished books that she also has planned. There’s a lot of material there.

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem. As of 2014, Pierce herself had wisely pointed out that because her books are so interconnected, someone would need to buy her entire universe.

Alas, that means that Alanna and her successors may not appear at all on the big screen, but until then, I can dream about a Tortall anthology series on the small screen. Can’t I?