IP Picks🔎: YA Romance? Why Not Two! A Pair of Teen Adventures

➕A prestige drama set in Haiti and a Dark Academia thriller

YA on the Rise: Leah Jeffries as Annabeth Chase, Walker Scobell as Percy Jackson, and Aryan Simhadri as Grover Underwood in Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.

Looking through my notes, I noticed that I’ve accumulated a stockpile of backlist selections that I haven’t had a chance to share with you. Starting this week, I’m going to remedy that with an extra helping of these picks.

Part of what makes this job so much fun for me is the chance to explore odd corners and eddies for compelling material, especially older titles. Sometimes this happens when an author I’m not super-familiar with publishes a new book and I begin to explore their earlier work and make some inquiries. Sometimes it happens when I feature a book and the author drops me a note: “Hey, if you thought my new book was good, check out this older title that was optioned but has reverted back to me.”

Sometimes, I get a hot tip when I ask an agent for the title of a book that they represented which still tugs at them as something that should’ve gotten more attention for its adaptation potential. And sometimes suggestions come from friends who tell me about an older book that they loved and wonder why it didn’t get made into a movie.

Occasionally, I feel like the IP version of a doctor who’s constantly being asked to diagnose the minor ailments of friends and relatives. People assume that I must know why this or that never get made into a movie. I almost never know the answer off the top of my head, but curiosity and ego usually push me to get to the bottom of the mystery.

So let’s make this a Hot Backlist Summer.

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Onto this week’s picks:

• A cute rom-com/adventure about a teen couple trying to figure out their feelings for each other while helping one of their exes make off with a fortune in stolen coins

• A dark-academia thriller about a working-class music student at Cambridge who becomes enthralled with a charismatic and wealthy classmate who’s also dabbling in the occult

• A romantasy set at a prep school for demigods

• A black-comedy about a Florida cop training police in Haiti who gets caught up in an effort to oust a corrupt local politician

• A historical drama about an overlooked civil rights hero and how he changed the course of American history