Hollywood screenwriters Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson sold a YA fantasy trilogy called The Familiars to Barbara Lalicki at HarperCollins Children’s. The deal, for a six-figure sum, was handled by agent Markus Hoffman at Regal Literary.
Hoffman tells SFScope that “the first volume in the trilogy, Animal Wizardry, is scheduled for publication in Fall 2010, and HarperCollins have high hopes and are working towards establishing a new franchise with these books.”
Epstein and Jacobson have teamed up for writing credits on Not Another Teen Movie (2001), The Comebacks (2007), and Extreme Movie (2008, which they also directed), as well as the forthcoming Trucker Academy (2010) and The Transplants (2011).
Hoffman also offers this description of the series: “Set in the magical Queendom of Vastia, the trilogy revolves around a street-smart alley cat named Aldwyn who rather by accident is chosen by Jack, a gifted young magician, to be his animal companion—his familiar. Aldwyn has no magical skills that he’s aware of, but adoption by a young sorcerer seems a more attractive option than continuing his hardscrabble life on the streets of Vastia’s capital, Bridgetower, where he’s in perpetual danger of being captured by bounty hunters, the terrifying Grimslade first and foremost among them. And so, leaving the mean streets of Bridgetower behind, Aldwyn happily joins Jack, his two fellow students, and their familiars, the blue jay Skylar, and the tree frog Gilbert, at Kalstaff’s magic school of Stone Runlet. But the pastoral idyll of Stone Runlet is shattered almost immediately: a deadly threat to the Queendom makes its presence felt, and suddenly Aldwyn, Skylar, and Gilbert find themselves on a dangerous mission—a journey full of adventures and discoveries that they must not fail in.”