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

Cover to A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. Image via Simon & Schuster.

36. The Gemma Doyle Trilogy

We do believe that we promised that Libba Bray’s works would show up more than once on this list, and we’re already fulfilling that promise. (No spoilers, but another novel may or may not show up. See, that’s not spoiling anything. There’s no commitment there, right?)

Gemma Doyle’s adventures open with A Great and Terrible Beauty. As the book’s description states, you’ve got a period piece, a touch of the Gothic, a group of heroines, and also other worlds. In other words, it’s a lot like something like Marissa Doyle’s Leland Sisters, in that there’s plenty of crossover here. The series starts in 1895, as well, so it’s again dealing with an often-ignored period in history.

With all three books rather thick, this series may very well lend itself better to television, but then again, Harry Potter books only got thicker as they went on, but Order of the Phoenix is the second-shortest movie, only after Deathly Hallows Part 2. In other words, length does not determine whether a TV series or a film series would be better. However, with such a deep, complex world in Gemma Doyle, some additional time to dive in and really explore everything would never hurt.