Into the Bright Open: a Secret Garden Remix

In the Remixed Classics series, authors from marginalized backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lens to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male canon. This queer YA reimagining ofThe Secret Gardensubverts the cishet and white status quo of the original in a tale of family secrets wonderful and horrifying.

Mary Lennox didn’t think about death until the day it knocked politely on her bedroom door and invited itself in. When a terrible accident leaves her orphaned at fifteen, she is sent to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with an uncle she's never met.

At first the impassive, calculating girl believes this new manor will be just like the one she left in Toronto: cold, isolating, and anything but cheerful, where staff is treated as staff andneverlike family. But as she slowly allows her heart to open like the first blooms of spring, Mary comes to find that this strange place and its strange people—most of whom are Indigenous—may be what she can finally call home.

Then one night Mary discovers Olive, her cousin who has been hidden away in an attic room for years due to a "nervous condition." The girls become fast friends, and Mary wonders why this big-hearted girl is being kept out of sight and fed medicine that only makes her feel sicker. When Olive's domineering stepmother returns to the manor, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on.

With the help of a charming, intoxicatingly vivacious Metis girl named Sophie, Mary begins digging further into family secrets both wonderful and horrifying to figure out how to free Olive. And some of the answers may lie within the walls of a hidden, overgrown and long-forgotten garden the girls stumble upon while wandering the wilds...

The Remixed Classics Series
A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remixby C.B. Lee
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remixby Bethany C. Morrow
Travelers Along the Way: A Robin Hood Remixby Aminah Mae Safi
What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remixby Tasha Suri
Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remixby Anna-Marie McLemore
My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remixby Kalynn Bayron
Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remixby Caleb Roehrig
Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remixby Cherie Dimaline
Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remixby Gabe Cole Novoa
This Wretched Beauty: A Dorian Gray Remixby Elle Grenier