Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
… But I’ve found the reality is different; there are a lot of duds out there for me, some highly praised, and I either DNF them or finish them just because. Yet there are some I’ve thought terrific.
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Common flaws for me are a mindset that’s unbelievable in the setting and straying too far from the standard story.
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Agree.
Spinning Silver by Novik an interesting mashup of three fairytales. Enjoyed and read because I'd read her Dragons in Napoleonic War, but I didn't like Uprooted for two reasons, one was the gratuitous unexpected sex scene (though at least not GRR Martin style) and the other was it seemed to lose way at the end.
Kitchen Sink approach and not too bad: The Seven Kingdoms: Books 1-9 Box Set by Cordelia Castel + The Princesses Reimagines loads of well known ones. But Pratchett in Discworld re-does tropes best.
Then a separate category is the modern sequel that takes (ideally oldest canonical version) of possibly immortal characters and imagines what the they are doing now. Rick Riordan, Neil Gaiman, Joanne Harris and Alan Garner do it very differently. But I have a vested interest in this!
If going for modern retelling of Arthurian then Mary Stewart. If you MUST have T.H. White, then his actual books, not awful Novelizations of Disney.