Modern Retellings of Classic Novels

Book Summary

This is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Like Copperfield, Copperhead examines institutional poverty, but in contemporary Appalachia.

Born to a teenage single mother, Damon (soon to be known as Demon) braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, opioid addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

Book Summary

This unique retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is told from the perspective of Mr. March, the mysterious and absent father from the classic novel. In March, Mr. March leaves his wife and daughters to serve as a chaplain in the Union army during the Civil War, where his experiences test his faith in both the Union and himself.

After recovering from a near-fatal illness, Mr. March must reassemble and reconnect with his family.

Book Summary

Ayesha lives with her boisterous Muslim family in Toronto and dreams of being a poet. For now, however, she needs her teaching job in order to pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle.

She’s lonely, and it doesn’t help that her family is constantly reminding her that her younger cousin has received close to one hundred marriage proposals. Nonetheless, she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is the opposite of everything she thinks she’s looking for. Despite being handsome and smart, he’s also conservative, judgmental, and dressed like he’s straight out of the seventh century.

When a surprise engagement is announced between her cousin and Khalid, Ayesha is forced to confont her irritating attraction to him. Things are further complicated when she hears some unsettling new gossip about his family.

Book Summary

Jane is new to town. Working as a broke dog-walker in a fancy, gated neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, she can hide her real identity while lifting tchotchkes and jewelry right out from under the bored housewives who employ her without them even noticing.

But then she meets the most mysterious resident in Thornfield Estates. Eddie recently lost his wife, Bea, who drowned in a boating accident with her best friend. Jane doesn’t just see a grieving widower; she sees an opportunity. Eddie is rich and handsome and could offer her the protection she’s yearned for.

As Jane and Eddie begin to fall for one another, Jane feels increasingly haunted by the legacy of Bea. How can she live up to Eddie’s first wife with her rags-to-riches origin story and the wildly successful southern lifestyle brand that she built? And how long will Jane be able to hide her real identity?

Book Summary

This novel reimagines the story of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter.

In the early 1800s, young seamstress Isobel sailed to the New World from Scotland. Her husband, Edward, has become addicted to opium, so they are trying to leave their secrets and debts behind. However, shortly after arriving in Salem, Edward leaves Isobel alone when he joins a ship as a medic.

When Isobel meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, they grow close. One is a muse, and one is a dark storyteller, but which is which?

Book Summary

For 23 years, Emma has led a comfortable life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. However, when she plays matchmaker for her sister, Margo, it results in a wedding, and Margo relocates downtown. Simultaneously, Emma’s friends seem to be traveling constantly, leaving her feeling bored and alone as her final year of graduate school looms.

Fortunately, she finds a potential new friend in Nadine, a newcomer to the city from Ohio. Emma is thrilled to give Nadine an NYC-style makeover as their friendship blossoms. Meanwhile, her childhood friend and neighbor, George Knightly, continues to dampen her spirits with his lectures on adulthood. Little does she know, this renewed attention from Knightly is because he can’t seem to get her off his mind.

Book Summary

Life is tough for single-mom Birdie in her small Alaskan town where she brings her daughter with her to work at a roadside lodge. She’s getting by, but she misses the happier days of her youth when she roamed free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur is known as a recluse. Although he typically only appears in town during the change of the seasons, he brings Birdie’s daughter Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Even though most people avoid Arthur, Birdie finds herself falling for him and the wild land he inhabits.

Despite the warnings from those who car about them, Birdie decides that she and Emaleen will move into Arthur’s isolated mountain cabin. She envisions an idyllic, simple life off the grid, far from roads, telephones, and electricity. But she’ll soon discover that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she ever imagined.

Book Summary

In the aftermath of their father’s business scandal, sisters Jane and Celia Woodward are forced out of their San Francisco tea shop. Jane wants to stay put in the place she’s always called home, but Celia insists they move to Austin, Texas. Together with their kid sister, Margot, they head south for a fresh start.

Of course, moving to a new place doesn’t immediately solve all of their problems. Their living situation poses challenges and tensions rise between Jane Celia, exacerbated by Jane’s new love interest.

Jane is falling for an up-and-coming musician named Sean Willis. He has a knack for charming everyone he encounters – except for retired Marine Captain Callum Beckett. Callum thought he’d spend his entire career in the military, but after losing both his father and his left leg, he finds himself unexpectedly back in Texas.

Book Summary

Funke had a happy childhood growing up in Nigeria with her art teacher mother and her professor father. But following a tragedy, she’s sent to England – a place she only knows from her mother’s stories. The much-lauded estate she’s heard so much about is now dilapidated, and both the weather and the food leave a lot to be desired.

The only member of her mother’s family who doesn’t act cold and distant is her free-spirited cousin, Liv. Filled with warmth and kindness, Liv helps Funke heal. As the two girls grow into women, they become close friends and Funke feels fiercely protective of Liv until another tragedy tears them apart.

In the shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to find her way forward. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, and Somerset, England, over the course of two decades, the cousins – separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition – will have to confirm whether a family’s generational wrongs can ever be righted.

Book Summary

Revisit the glittering Jazz Age with this atmospheric novel that reimagines The Great Gatsby from the perspective of three alternating female voices. When Jay Gatsby was found shot dead in his swimming pool in August of 1922, and a local mechanic was found dead in the woods nearby, the police viewed it as an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide. 

But then a diamond hairpin is found in the bushes around the pool, and three women suddenly become suspects – Daisy Buchanan, who once thought she’d marry Gatsby; Jordan Baker, who has a secret that could derail both her golf career and her friendship with Daisy; and Catherine McCoy, a suffragette who’s fighting for women’s rights and to protect her own sister from a terrible marriage.

This is a tale of money and power, marriage and friendship, love and desire, and ultimately murder.

Book Summary

Catalina “Cat” Capuleta is an ambitious singer living in San Antonio. When she is given the opportunity to join superstar heartthrob Patricio Galán on his seven-week Mariachi concert tour, she knows it’s the chance of a lifetime. Patricio might be a superstar heartthrob, but he also turns out to be demanding and arrogant. He challenges Cat at every turn, but she’s determined to make him feel he’s met his match.

Cat is also determined not to fall for him because her one and only goal is her own success so she can make her family proud. But when the duo hit the road, the chemistry is undeniable – even the audience can feel it.

Book Summary

This modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet is unexpectedly set in Alaska. When the main character, Helene, was young, she filled notebooks with her dreams of the perfect man. However, real life brought her a messy divorce. Now, she’s done with fantasies and moves to a small town in Alaska to write her novel.

However, life is full of twists, and she meets Sebastian, who is her childhood dream down to the smallest details. But Helene isn’t the only one with a past filled with broken hearts. Sebastian has his own secrets and broken heart.

Book Summary

Charlie greets the women in his family, including his wife and four daughters, by saying “Hello, Beautiful” and truly sees something special in each of them. Unfortunately, Charlie is resented by his wife, Rose, because he’s an alcoholic, which also impacts his ability to provide for the family.

Their oldest daughter, Julie, is smart and ambitious. When she meets William, whose family couldn’t be more different than her own, he’s at college on a basketball scholarship. For William, the sport has been his saving grace and a substitute for the love of family. At least until he meets Julie and her family embraces him in their family unit when they become a couple. Once that happens, the family refuses to give up on him.

While you’ll get some fall vibes when Julie heads to college, Hello Beautiful also follows the characters for nearly four decades. The book begins in the main character’s childhood, in the 1960s, and spans into their middle age years.

Book Summary

The Hours is a modern retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway that incorporates Woolf as one of three characters in an overlapping story.

As you read, you’ll travel between Woolf in 1920s London, a mother in 1940s suburban LA trying to fit in time to read Mrs. Dalloway, and Clarissa Vaughan in 1990s Manhattan. Each character struggles to reconcile hope and despair in this moving novel.

Book Summary

Simultaneously sad and uplifting, Nora and Kettle are two teenage neighbors, each facing their own hardships. Kettle is a Japanese American orphan trying to survive after a period of internment. Despite his young age of 17, he’s determined to help other orphans.

Nora has a much different life as the daughter of a prominent civil rights attorney. Everything looks privileged from the outside, but she endures abuse to protect her sister, Frankie, behind closed doors. When Nora is nearly killed, her path crosses with Kettle’s, and they learn to lean on each other.

Book Summary

This novel imagines what Mary Bennet’s life would have looked like if the bookish, intellectual middle daughter had taken a different path from the one laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice.

Like Austen’s other heroines, Mary will learn that she can only expect joy after she throws off the false expectations and accepts who she really is. While Mary’s destiny diverges from that of her sisters and does not involve broad acres of landed gentry, it does involve a man. Mary must decide whether he’s genuinely the right one for her.

Book Summary

Dee settled in Kansas to attend graduate school and live with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em after her globe-trotting mother passed away. However, now she needs a quick escape after a humiliating public breakup with a faculty member, which felt like a tornado ripped apart her life. The Trinity College writing program is just the fresh start she needs!

In Ireland, she meets three new companions – seemingly brainless (but charming and hot) Sam Clery, heartless Tim Woodman, and fiercely loyal Reeti Kaur. With her new friends and the incredible women mentoring her in the writing program, Dee experiences a year of opportunities and changes. With everyone’s help, she’s ready to face her fears and apply all the lessons she has learned along the way.

Book Summary

Jeannette was born on a Louisiana plantation to an enslaved woman and a white man. She’s raised alongside her white half-sister. When her father dies suddenly, his wife refuses 12-year-old Jeannette her inheritance and sells her into slavery in Mississippi before the onset of the Civil War. 

Jeannette escapes enslavement and travels to Philadelphia, then New York and Ohio, all in search of purpose, love, and her place in the country. She meets the proprietor of Fortitude Mansion, a safe haven for escaped slaves, where she teaches for a time. But when she no longer feels that she belongs there, she must once again continue on her journey of self-discovery. 

Book Summary

Sixty-somethings Julie Roseman and Romeo Cacciamani own competing flower shops in Boston. Not only are they business rivals, but their families have hated each other forever (though no one seems to remember why). 

So imagine their surprise when Julie and Romeo bump into each other at a business seminar and feel an intense and unexpected attraction to one another. They are ready to put the long-standing family feud aside, but not everyone is eager to see them have a happy ending. Romeo’s octogenarian mother, Julie’s nosey ex-husband, and all their grown children are determined to keep them apart.

This modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet (minus the tragic ending) is honest, witty, and filled with snappy dialogue. If you can’t get enough of these two older protagonists, you’re in luck because they have a second story called Julie and Romeo Get Lucky.