Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Six notable YA retellings of classics

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Dahlia Adler tagged six great Young Adult retellings of classics, including:
Great, by Sara J. Benincasa

If I hadn’t been excited enough at the prospect of reading a contemporary YA retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, the fact that Benincasa wrote it with a female Gatsby and a same-sex romance definitely put me over the top. It’s an impressively close retelling, artfully brought into the modern age via blogging and the Hamptons. Readers of the original will easily spot the parallels, and the characterizations of Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, and the rest are transferred so well to their teen counterparts, you might forget that The Great Gatsby didn’t feature adolescents in the first place.
Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue