EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures is making a deal to option screen rights to The Search For WondLa, the first installment of a new children’s book series by Tony DiTerlizzi, author of The Spiderwick Chroncles. Deal is 6-figures for a book will be published as a lead title by Simon & Schuster this fall.

The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein repped the book and will be involved as producer.

A human orphan girl is raised in a hi-tech subterranean home by a mother who happens to be a robot. The youth , Eva Nine, is forced to flee when the home is attacked, and she tries to figure out her place in the world as she is on the run with her robot mother, an oversized water beast and a tall blue creature. I’m told the book was brought in by Nan Shipley’s Georgica Literary Productions, which is scouting for the studio.

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