picking your brains?

[valancy_s]

I'm trying to think of modernizations of classic works of literature along the lines of Bridget Jones, She's the Man, that kind of thing - other than Jane Austen or Shakespeare. Help? Can be a film, TV, a novel, whatever.

ETA: Including children's and YA retellings, btw.

Comments

[tinuviellen]

Not a huge fan of the movie, btw, but there's always Rent. Or Spring Awakening (well, play to musical, I don't know how easy that'd be to work with. But, hey, there's Wicked! Book to musical movie to retelling to musical.

[tinuviellen]

Not that The Wizard of Oz is exactly classic literature of the type you meant.

[winkingstar]

There are many fairy tale retellings! I just recently read Beastly (Alex Flinn), which puts Beauty & the Beast in modern NYC. There's another retelling of B&B, also set in NY, but in the 19th century (I think), by Nancy Willard.

I have not yet read Ice (Sarah Beth Durst), but it is a retelling of East o' the Sun featuring an Arctic research station, so there's some modernization.

Depending on your interpretation of the classic Cinderella tale, Countess Below Stairs (Eva Ibbotson) is a modernized variant.

Red Ridin' in the Hood (Patricia Santos Marcantonio) presents retellings of several traditional tales, with a modernized and Latinized flavor.

For mythology, there's the Percy Jackson series (Rick Riordan). I've only read the first two so far, but the first one (The Lightning Thief) is very closely tied with the classical myths-I don't know if it would qualify as a direct retelling, per se, but as someone who is intimately acquainted with classical mythology, I was definitely able to predict most of the plot points