Joe Books opted for an alternate take on the standard movie novelization for its upcoming adaption of director Bruce McDonald latest film. The independent Toronto publisher hired Kat Kruger, the Vancouver-based YA author, to pen a companion to Weirdos, a black-and-white coming-of-age film rich with Canadian influence.

“Bruce met with us earlier this year to explore ways we could work together, and this came out of those conversations,” says Deanna McFadden, associate publisher of Joe Books. “[The] film raises important issues that make sense in terms of a book for a YA audience, and we were intrigued by the possibilities around telling this story in another format.”

Written by Nova Scotia playwright and screenwriter Daniel MacIvor, the movie, which debuted in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows two teenage runaways as they hitchhike through Atlantic Canada in the 1970s. The book version will be published simultaneously with the film‚ the release of which was initially slated for November 2017‚ but has since been changed to February after some welcome praise at TIFF.

Kruger says MacIvor’s distance from the project was unexpectedly helpful, as she was able to establish some sense of character ownership when the change in medium left gaps to be filled. “They’re [MacIvor’s] characters and sprang from his imagination, but I needed to give them a life of their own, off-screen,” she says. “This was a unique challenge but one that stretched my creativity. … I’ve worked on scripts and a trilogy of YA books, so it was an interesting combination of the two. It [was] an opportunity to add layers of meaning across different formats.”

Joe Books is no stranger to movie tie-ins, though Weirdos is something of a departure from the Disney comic books and adaptions found in its catalogue. While Kruger didn’t work directly with MacIvor, her familiarity with the screenwriter’s output, previous script collaboration jobs, and a decade of living close to the story’s East Coast setting lent her a certain expertise.

“Kat was the exact right choice for this project,” McFadden says. “She’s done a wonderful job of translating what’s on screen and diving even deeper into the lives of these two young people.”