Another mixtape to come? Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park may get a sequel, the YA author exclusively tells Us Weekly. Rowell spilled the beans when asked where the beloved characters would be today.
“I don’t want to say because after I wrote Eleanor & Park I immediately outlined a sequel. And my agent discouraged me from writing it because at the time I had no career. I had nothing, really. There was no guarantee that Eleanor & Park was going to be published. And he was like, ‘No, don’t do this. You can’t write a sequel to a book that hasn’t been published. You’re actually just writing your own fan-fiction,’” she recalls to Us. “So I agreed to write it later. It became popular enough though that I felt like it was too intimidating to go back to it. And I didn’t want to disappoint people. I still know where they are but I kind of don’t want to tell anyone in case there is a sequel.”
Eleanor & Park was released in February 2013. The contemporary romance novel followed two high school misfits in Omaha, Nebraska, in the late ‘80s who fall for each other (on a school bus) thanks to a love for comic books and music.
Rowell, 44, says that “yeah” there is a second chance for a second book, but when is still up in the air.
“They are like ghosts. Books kind of come to you and hang around you for a while and you either write them then or you lose them. So I have about four or five books outlined that I haven’t written. And some of them I don’t think I will ever write because they came to me but I just didn’t have time to do it. And so they left,” Rowell explains. “But that sequel comes back to me at least every year or so. I’ll be in-between projects and just driving around and I’ll just be struck by — I’ll spend a whole day thinking about the characters and writing notes and kind of getting caught up in it. It comes back to me.”
As for who she would cast if a film was developed based on the novel? Well, that’s more of a “tricky” question.
“I can’t think of any romantic comedies that has an Asian man as the lead or a [bigger girl] as the lead,” she tells Us. “I’m sure they are out there but they aren’t starring in [any films]. I kept thinking about how wonderful it would be to have characters like this get their own movie.”
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