Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix

Written by Cherie Dimaline

Narrated by Brefny Caribou

In the Remixed Classics series, authors from marginalized backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lens to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male canon. This queer YA reimagining of The Secret Garden subverts the cishet and white status quo of the original in a tale of family secrets wonderful and horrifying.

Mary Lennox didn’t think about death until the day it knocked politely on her bedroom door and invited itself in. When a terrible accident leaves her orphaned at fifteen, she is sent to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with an uncle she's never met.

At first the impassive, calculating girl believes this new manor will be just like the one she left in Toronto: cold, isolating, and anything but cheerful, where staff is treated as staff and never like family. But as she slowly allows her heart to open like the first blooms of spring, Mary comes to find that this strange place and its strange people—most of whom are Indigenous—may be what she can finally call home.

Then one night Mary discovers Olive, her cousin who has been hidden away in an attic room for years due to a "nervous condition." The girls become fast friends, and Mary wonders why this big-hearted girl is being kept out of sight and fed medicine that only makes her feel sicker. When Olive's domineering stepmother returns to the manor, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on.

With the help of a charming, intoxicatingly vivacious Metis girl named Sophie, Mary begins digging further into family secrets both wonderful and horrifying to figure out how to free Olive. And some of the answers may lie within the walls of a hidden, overgrown and long-forgotten garden the girls stumble upon while wandering the wilds...

The Remixed Classics Series
A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix by C.B. Lee
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix by Bethany C. Morrow
Travelers Along the Way: A Robin Hood Remix by Aminah Mae Safi
What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri
Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore
My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron
Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix by Caleb Roehrig
Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix by Cherie Dimaline
Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix by Gabe Cole Novoa


A Macmillan Audio production from Feiwel & Friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250909671

Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community in Ontario. Her 2017 book, The Marrow Thieves, won the Governor General's Award and the prestigious Kirkus Prize for Young Readers, and was the fan favourite for CBC's 2018 Canada Reads. It was named a Book of the Year on numerous lists including the National Public Radio, the School Library Journal, the New York Public Library, the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire and the CBC, has been translated into several languages, and continues to be a national bestseller five years later. Her most recent novel for adults, Empire of Wild (Penguin Random House Canada) became an instant Canadian bestseller and was named Indigo's #1 Best Book of 2019. It was published in the US through William Morrow in July 2020. Cherie received the prestigious Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award in 2021. Her most recent YA novel, Hunting By Stars, was published in Canada and the US in 2021, and is a 2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award Young Adult Honor Book. It will be published in the UK in 2022 with Jacaranda Books. She lives in Midland, ON, where she is working on a few new YA books, her next adult novel and writing for film and TV projects.