Elle Fanning will star in the big screen adaptation of Kevin Henkes’ award-winning Young Adult novel “Olive’s Ocean”, according to Deadline. Producers behind the still in development project has just set Christina Hammonds Reed to adapt the screenplay.

Fanning will play Martha, a normal 12 year old girl who gets her first real taste of growing up when she’s handed a page out of the journal of a classmate recently killed in a car accident. Olive wanted to be a writer, just like Martha and also thought of Martha as “the nicest person in my whole entire class.” A summer of soul searching and coming of age follows as she vacations with her family on Cape Cod.

Fanning seems to have been instrumental in bringing this project together, as producer Donald Rosenfeld optioned the rights while working on “Effie” with Fanning’s older sister Dakota. He asked the younger Fanning what her favorite book was, and now she’ll get to star in the movie. Boy, I guess it’s not easy growing up anywhere! “I haven’t worked with a more dedicated actor than Dakota and can’t wait to work with Elle,” Rosenfeld tells Deadline. “There is such talent, they are young but they are old souls.”

At the tender age of 14 Fanning has already proven herself a capable and versatile actress. She won raves for her performance as a small town girl and budding young actress in JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg’s alien adventure caper “Super 8″ and went just about 180 in the opposite direction in Francis Ford Coppola’s experimental gothic tale “Twixt.” Another altogether different performance showed up in Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo”, and she’ll next head to TIFF for the premiere of British coming of age drama “Ginger and Rosa.” She’s currently playing the slumbering princess in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty remake “Maleficent”, with Angelina Jolie in the title role.