Children Of Blood And Bone author calls film adaptation "the worst thing I have ever had to live through"

Adeyemi didn’t go into details about what went wrong with the making of the Gina Prince-Bythewood-directed film, which released its first trailer this week, and which is set for a January 2027 release—but did go into fairly intense detail about how the experience affected her. “I’m actually only going to speak about what happened after I left that set of my own film adaptation hyperventilating and sobbing,” Adeyemi—who instantly became a force in the YA book market after the 2018 debut of the first Children novel—said in the video (per Variety). “There are many witnesses, so it’s not really a secret. I came back to America and suffered such severe somatic pain and so many panic attacks. I knew it was so bad that I would never ever be able to watch this film, and I made peace with that.”

Although she says she is “still being antagonized behind the scenes,” Adeyemi declined to name who on the film’s set she was having conflict with. (Variety notes that the author previously uploaded a now-deleted TikTok video earlier this month in which she showed screenshots from a group chat that seemed to show her telling star Amandla Stenberg “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me.” Stenberg has been at the center of a controversy surrounding the film ever since being cast last year, due to her skin color being significantly lighter than how Adeyemi describer her character in the books; the Hunger Games alum acknowledged issues surrounding colorism in her own since-deleted TikTok video about the movie.)

And while Prince-Bythewood, Stenberg, and studio Paramount have all been silent on the matter so far, Adeyemi has made it clear that she’s made a pretty drastic break with the adaptation of her extremely successful YA novel. “Please understand,” she concluded in the video, “I never want to hear about this project again. I don’t have anything to say about the people who made it. I do not care anymore. I’m trying to move on. This video might make it worse, but I don’t know how it can be any worse. So I’m just going to share that and let it live.” Which, as far as ways to get people to not ask you about whatever the hell happened during the big, expensive adaptation of your novels that you’ve now disowned in extremely public fashion goes, seems honestly kind of counterproductive—but it’s pretty clear that whatever happened on the film’s set has left Adeyemi significantly shaken.