I adored Burnett's tale of a privileged young girl who discovers, for a time, what it means to be young, vulnerable, and poor in Victorian England, and read it countless times as a girl. Hilary McKay's sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic Victorian tale, A Little Princess is, as it transpires, another such exception. There are exceptions to this general rule of course, from John Gardner's Grendel, which offers the monster's view of the epic of Beowulf, to Jane Lesley Conly's two follow-ups ( Racso and the Rats of NIMH and R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH) to her father's Mrs. I don't think I've ever come across a Jane Austen remake that impressed me (and I've read a few), and the current craze for "monster-mashups" - think Jane Slayre, Little Women and Werewolves, Android Karenina, and so on - leave me cold. It always seems, somehow, to be riding another's coattails (I know, I know - aren't all writers doing that, to some extent?, you might be wondering), and it rarely satisfies the reader who loved the original. I am distrustful, generally speaking, of sequels written by someone other than the original author, particularly when the sequel in question is following upon an especially beloved classic.
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