Tomi Adeyemi on the Children of Blood and Bone Film: 'I Don't Plan to Watch It'

Tomi Adeyemi does not intend to watch the film adaptation of her own bestselling novel. "I don't plan to watch it," she says of the screen version of Children of Blood and Bone, the young adult trilogy opener that made her a literary star – and whose journey through Hollywood, she says, became a source of profound distress.

Adeyemi is now moving decisively beyond that chapter. Her new novel, The Siren, carries her own portrait on its cover – a highly unusual choice for fiction. The photograph fills the frame: her face unsoftened by a smile, her gaze fixed directly on the viewer.

"It's terrifying – like the Mona Lisa, staring at you everywhere," she says, laughing.

The cover is a statement of ownership, according to the author. After 12 years spent inside the world of Children of Blood and Bone – a debut that earned her a record-breaking YA book deal before the fallout with Hollywood followed – Adeyemi wanted her new book to belong unmistakably to her.

The rise was swift and historic. Children of Blood and Bone, the first book in the YA trilogy, turned Adeyemi into a literary star, and the publishing deal behind it set records in the young adult market. Success brought its own pressures, which the author now addresses openly.

The film adaptation sits at the center of that tension. What should have been a crowning achievement has instead, in Adeyemi's telling, become a source of profound distress – enough that she has chosen not to see the finished work at all.

The Siren marks her answer. By placing her own unsmiling face on the front of the book, she signals a reset: an author reclaiming her work and her image after more than a decade defined by one franchise and its troubled path to the screen.

For readers, the message is direct. Whatever the film becomes, Adeyemi's next act will be on her own terms – announced, quite literally, by her own face.