The Amazon listing for the novelization of The Peanuts Movie has been updated, so it now lists the authors as To Be Announced and Charles M. Schulz.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ms. Announced’s work, well, I haven’t read much of it before myself, but she must be good, she has a lot of work in the pipeline. For example, there’s Untitled Picture Book, which Simon & Schuster will be releasing for the Kindle on December 31, 2030.

Movie novelizations are an interesting challenge – I’ve got some friends who have written them, and always wanted to take a stab at them myself. For adult novelizations, the big challenge is that you really have to flesh the film out a lot, the content of a typical film is more of a novelette than a novel. Sometimes, you can restore scenes that were edited out of the script, sometimes you just build new stuff, tease minor moments into subplots, and so forth. Less of that would be needed with a novelization for kids like this one, of course, due to its shorter length. However, capturing Peanuts in prose has always been a tricky matter, both in terms of tone and capturing moments of visual humor in text… particularly when facing animation focused on Snoopy, extended dialogue-free fantasy sequences. I hope that Ms. Announced is up to the task!

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