Tomi Adeyemi, again.

Mini-Musing 07/07/26

Toni Adeyemi – again.

I don’t know if I’ll catch trouble for this but, I was researching – what I can’t recall – when this story popped up in one of my feeds. Upon seeing it, I unfortunately let myself go down the rabbit hole. Although it wasn’t as deep as I thought.

I’ve read none of Ms. Adeyemi’s books. It is not because I have anything against her – well I have one thing, I’ll mention that later and I’m not saying she’s a poor writer. Her work is well-loved. They just didn’t interest me. Also, there was that incident with the lovely Ms. Nora Roberts who I’ve met – and went all fangirl on her, but she was so nice about it. Not to mention, I gave her copies of Tinderbox and Tarotmancer.  Oh s*it! I’m going to send her The Hatter’s Daughter and Steelbound.

Any writer who has at least of grain of publishing industry knowledge knows you can’t copyright titles. I’m still waiting for Lou Diamond Phillips among others to show up. By stating outright that her [Adeyemi] title was like Nora’s and accused her of plagiarizing, resulted in Nora getting a barrage of hate mail about an author, in her own words, she had never heard of. Not to mention her publisher had thought up the title years before.

I wasn’t aware that Children of Blood and Bone was being made into a movie, with Gina Prince-Bythewood at the helm, whom, I had no idea, also directed The Woman King (which I highly recommend) with Viola Davis. And I just love me some Viola Davis! Now, I’m going to see what other movies Prince-Blythewood gave us.

I probably don’t need to go deeply into the story. But Adeyemi to paraphrase is, “…separating herself from the movie.” Not to mention posting a very terse TikTok video that doesn’t give much of an explanation and a copy of a chat where she allegedly, everyone is saying, although you can see the name, is basically telling the lead actress Amandla Stenberg, “Bye, Felicia.” OK, so she didn’t use that famous Friday quote, but you get the idea. There is one thing I want to clarify. I do not know what happened behind the scenes, nor will I speculate. Plenty of people are doing that. I can’t say I agree with how she handled it, although it was her right to do so however she pleases. But it’s not giving a very good impression. Likely, as some have mentioned, no studio will want to risk working with her again. Even if she starts her own production company ala Ava DuVernay or Tyler Perry, whomever Adeyemi tries to make a deal with in the movie industry may slowly move towards the exit.

It’s a shame really, that things didn’t work out. Frankly, I and many of my author friends and colleagues would break—um—would be ecstatic to have their books made into movies (insert obvious hint here), especially by the producer/director who made their personal favorites.

It’s difficult enough already for those of us who are not million-dollar best sellers to get the movie and television industry to even look at our books. And every time something like this happens, it raises eyebrows with all involved. It just makes it harder for the rest of us.

Although I’d rather see my book series as an animated television series, I’ll take a movie deal any day.

Peace~

Wendy