An eight-episode Amazon Prime series adaptation of the popular book series, Boys of Tommen, was announced on February 11th, 2026, by author Chloe Walsh, and I firmly believe that it could be the worst mistake she’s ever made.
This six-novel, ongoing Irish book series has boomed in popularity since the first book was published in 2018. Especially over the past year or two, the series has skyrocketed in fame, leading to what typically happens when a book takes off: a television adaptation.
The Boys of Tommen is a romance story that has its fair share of hard-hitting themes, like abuse, sexual assault, drug addiction, and suicide. It might be a romance collection on the outside, but it is truly a series about escape and recovery from severe trauma.
Due to the depth of the books in this series, and the fact that the current eight-episode series is supposed to be covering only the first two books, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be able to properly tell the story without cutting out significant plot points in the series.
To thoroughly capture the characters and their stories in a TV series, they’d have to make the show for mature audiences only, but it’s already looking like that won’t be the case, based on what we’ve heard so far. And from what has been publicly stated, the TV show is being written as a “forbidden love story”, which is wildly far from what this book series is really about. So it’s already clear that the writers of this show don’t understand what they’re producing.
Additionally, the setting of the books is Cork, Ireland, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. And it will be hard to accurately encapsulate that in the way the characters are described, especially when it comes to the different Irish dialects, physical descriptions, and ways of speaking that fit the time period in which the series takes place.
The physical features of the characters are often very important to the plot of the books as well. For example, in Binding 13 and Keeping 13, the first and second books of the series, the female protagonist, Shannon, is in an abusive household and barely eating due to this mistreatment. This has caused her growth to be stunted at the start of the first book. She’s described as looking significantly younger than her peers, due to her not growing properly.
By the end of the second book, Shannon is healthy and finally growing like a normal teenage girl. This is a VERY key part of her growth as a character and how the plot progresses, and it seems likely they’ll completely erase this development of her character if they’re trying to turn the first TWO books into an eight-episode series. The first two books have a lot of layers to the plot, and they may not prioritize the details of this kind of physical development.
There’s also a good chance they might completely modernize the series for convenience and make it far more inaccurate than I’m already predicting. Or they might water down the characters’ personalities and backstories entirely, only to make the series more appropriate for streaming TV.
At the end of the day, this is all just speculation. There’s going to be a streaming series, but there’s no confirmed cast, no release date, or anything else, so I can’t really be sure that they won’t adapt the books accurately.
It just seems unlikely, with what’s currently known about the show, that they will do justice to the book series. Make sure to read Boys of Tommen now, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
