Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden were two books that I read and reread more times than I could count as a child. I was very happy to see these two fantasy retellings in my Cybils nominations pile this year. They are quite different from each other, but both work whether or not you’ve read the originals.

The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett. Balzer + Bray, 2023. ISBN 978-0063142626. Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available from Libby.

Here is a magical reimagining of Anne of Green Gables.  Orphaned Grace has decided to give up on the orphanage – she’s been rejected by so many prospective families because her unsettling gaze makes it clear that she’s a witch.  Figuring that if she’s going to be labeled a witch, she might as well get some training, she walks a great distance to the house in the woods that’s rumored to belong to a witch and offers to be her apprentice.  The witch is suitably witchy, with a grandmotherly appearance and excellent baking skills, the better to lure children into her oven.  She doesn’t want an apprentice, but Grace sweet-talks her into letting Grace stay on, even though Grace’s familiar, a raven called Windweaver, isn’t allowed in the house.  

In short order, Grace meets an annoying fairy boy called Rum, swears eternal friendship with the neighbor girl, Sareena Khalil, and has to make her way at the village school. At the same time, she has just a year to work through all 100 spells in the witch’s spellbook to earn a full apprenticeship, trying to find increasingly impossible ingredients. 

There’s a darker edge to this story as the witch (who’s forgotten her real name) really does eat children, though no named children are harmed – sensitive readers be forewarned. “Matthew” is mostly out of the picture, so that his sweetness isn’t there to balance the witch’s tartness.  Still, Grace’s eternal optimism, big feelings, love of poetry, and belief that she can be a witch and use her powers for good carry the day.  Since you don’t need to know the original to understand this one, it’s an engrossing read both for lovers of Anne and those unfamiliar with her.  

Moongarden: Plotting the Stars 1: by Michelle A. Barry. Pixel+Ink, 2022. ISBN 978-1645951261. Read from a library copy.

In a future where plants have turned toxic and forced humans to escape Earth, 12-year-old Myra is a first year student at the Scientific Lunar Academy of Magic, S.L.A.M. for short.  She’s having a tough time – she’s in a room full of girls who don’t like her, had a fight with her best friend shortly before leaving, and is regularly skipping classes to escape the intense pressure she feels.  The pressure is because her parents are both famous Number Whisperers, whose magic focused around numbers.  Myra is good at math, sure, but she doesn’t have that critical magical ability that makes for a Creer.  Without that, she’ll be kicked out of the school and disappoint her parents forever.  

On a day when she’s exploring an abandoned part of the school, she finds a hidden laboratory, and with the help of a small and friendly robot, Bin-Ro, she’s able to open another secret door and find a secret garden.  A whole garden, when just having seeds is enough to condemn people to prison!  As she spends more time around the unfriendly director due to her school troubles, she learns that the food supply of the school and perhaps the solar system is at risk – but that she might have the forgotten skills to save them.  Along the way, Myra will have to make friends with people who can help her – Canter, a popular older boy, one of her roommates, and even one of the Reps, or cloned servants that she’s been taught to ignore.  

It took me a little while to see the Secret Garden parallels here – there is a secret garden, and Bin-ro is a cute substitute for the friendly robin in the original, but Myra isn’t an orphan and the other kid characters don’t align directly with those in the original.  The stakes are also a lot higher here, as Myra is trying to recover knowledge lost after being made illegal decades earlier.  It ends in a quite cliff-hangery way, so you might want to have book 2, Seagarden, on hand when reading this one.  It was released October 2023, and I definitely want to track it down once I’m done with my Cybils reading.  

For more middle grade classics remixed, try Breadcrumbs or The Real Boy by Anne Ursu or The Gilded Girl and The Tarnished Garden, both by Alyssa Colman.