Welcome to Booking Through Thursday, a weekly bookish meme about books and reading for everyone who loves both. Booking Through Thursday was first hosted by Deb. With permission, I’ve restarted it in 2026.
This week’s prompt:
What’s your take on retellings? Be they Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Sherlock Holmes, or any number of new titles coming into the public domain. Do you enjoy them? Does it depend on how you feel about the original or the interpretation? If you have one to recommend, let us know!
How do you feel about retellings? Do you enjoy them?
How to play:
- On your blog: Copy the question/image for your blog, answer it there, and post a quick comment here with a link or trackback to your post so we can read it.
- On social media: Copy the image, answer the prompt, and post a quick comment here with a link.
- Right here: Answer in the comments and start the discussion here. No need to have a blog to play.
Note: If it’s your first time here, your comment may end up in moderation. (My spam filter is aggressive.) I’ll be in after my writing sprints to set it free.
P.S. The prompt is always open, and you don’t have to play on Thursday. Comment whenever you like!
Discover more from Writing Wrongs
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’m going for the totally wishy-washy response of “it depends.”
Some retellings I really enjoy. A lot of these are Shakespeare-based. Perhaps because Shakespeare drew from stories that were already timeless (in a sense) that they remain that way, easily adaptable to the current moment.
On the other hand, as much as I love Jane Austen, I don’t read Jane Austen “fan fiction.” Some of the adaptations work for me and some don’t. Honestly, I think it has more to do with how I view certain stories. Some simply don’t need a sequel or an update, and I feel this way about Jane Austen.
I do love fairy tale retellings, both reading and writing. Some fairy tales really need a new ending (looking at you, Hans Christian Andersen). Also, since fairy tales and wonder tales are, again, timeless, they are easy to adapt to the current moment as well.
Sometimes I think that were it not for retellings, there’d be no literature at all. Truly, I suspect that someone, way back when, was complaining that Homer’s Iliad wasn’t nearly as good as the version they knew…
That said, I probably fall in the “it depends” camp as well. I love Clueless, and I’ve enjoyed the “goddess” stories by Costanza Casati (Clytemnestra, Babylonia), but I hated Scarlett, the sequel they made to Gone With the Wind. At the moment, in fact, I’m disinclined to like sequels in general on the basis that they are too frequently anemic versions of the originating story. Other thoughts may come to mind, and I may build on this comment later. Maybe.
I think you’re right about the Iliad. One of the problems with sequels is often the big character problem/flaw/whatever was solved in the first book, and there’s nowhere else to go in a second book. I sometimes feel like sequels are either a retread (but wait, we already solved that problem) or they end up breaking the promise at the end of the first book (what do you mean, you killed off the love interest?).