![]() ![]() Her character doesn’t change between the book and screen so much as become a more concentrated version with more room to set herself apart from the source material. (Her mother, lost years ago to the Fold, was “Shu,” the series’ stand-in for East Asian.) With only her best friend Mal (Archie Renaux) to rely on, Alina has spent her entire life being told she’s not enough, and therefore all the more determined to prove her worth. Played by Jessie Mei Li, Alina has long felt out of place in Ravka, the Soviet-esque nation in which she grew up. The Netflix version, however, takes Alina’s unique place a step further by making her biracial. While many others (the “Grisha”) have powers, Alina’s are unique unto herself, making her a classic Chosen One figure whose very existence threatens the old world order while promising a shinier new one. Alina Starkov is a scrappy orphan who discovers at the most traumatic moment of her life that she has special abilities that could save her world from the oppressive “Fold” - a vast expanse of shadows separating warring nations - once and for all. ![]() And even if it never gets quite as explicitly gory as the book’s events might suggest, this “Shadow and Bone” still has its genuinely startling moments, especially when bracing for what lurks inside the seemingly endless darkness of the Fold.īardugo’s heroine will feel familiar for anyone who’s dipped a toe into the genres of YA, fantasy or both. Yet it didn’t take long for me to become fully enveloped in it, lured in by clever choices, engrossing acting and costuming and production design that dances on the knife’s edge of lush and camp. Comprised of a central trilogy and various spinoffs in its “Grishaverse,” this is the kind of series with so many of its own terms, languages and traditions that turning on the subtitles might be advisable otherwise, the constant allusions in invented languages might blend together into one indecipherable syllable soup. Netflix’s sharp “ Shadow and Bone” adaptation, from “Arrival” writer Eric Heisserer, tackles Leigh Bardugo’s popular fantasy series. It doesn’t just require skill, but flexibility to well and truly adapt the material beyond a basic transposal. Embodying what makes a book sing for its readers isn’t as easy as casting a bunch of telegenic actors for the parts. Despite their constant overlap, television and narrative fiction are two entirely different mediums that usually require entirely different approaches. Change too much and risk the wrath of a passionate fanbase change too little and risk losing the magic in replicated story beats that make more sense on the page than the screen. Adapting a beloved book is one of the trickiest high wire acts there is in television.
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