The series and book are so fascinating, so unexpected and never quite go where you expect them to go. Just when you think Mahy is going to zig, she zags and then blows up a house.
To prove that I didn't sleep-deprivedly hallucinate this series, here is the trailer for the BBC series Maddigan's Quest:
Smug in the fact that it was just as weird as I remember, I began to think of what other books would make fantastic BBC miniseries.
Here's our Top 3:
Victorian England! Pretty dresses! Fierce orphan girls with mad skills! Secret lady society!
Mary Quinn is rescued from the gallows only to face a very different noose. As a penniless orphans, her future seems bleak until she is introduced to the shadowy Agency which uses their seeming disadvantages to solve crimes that stump Scotland Yard.
Basically: She is a spy. She solves crimes.
Get to it, BBC Writers.
2. Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Fans of the series have already created some wicked trailers (I love the casting in this one). It's like Enid Blyton's Malory Towers meets Gormenghast meets Picnic at Hanging Rock.
3. Carole Nelson Douglas's Irene Adler series
Rachel McAdams is a very good actress. She was brilliant in the Canadian comedy Slings and Arrows (Watch it! Watch it now! It will erase all the terrible memories of studying Shakespeare in high school) and while I was ostensibly reading something terribly important but in fact watching The Notebook out of the corner of my eye, she was very good in that too.
However, I feel that she was rather miscast in Sherlock Holmes. Not because she couldn't pull off all that fuchsia (all the more power to her) but because compared to Robert Downey Jr. she seemed rather... young. Instead of envisioning them as romantic partners, it felt like Sherlock Holmes was her dad. I was having Little Women flashbacks.
Anyhow, Carole Nelson Douglas's Irene Adler series would make a wicked BBC series and McAdams better dust off her English accent.
Any books you think would make a fantastic BBC miniseries?
