Into the Bright Open

Hello friends!

Welcome to our tour for the next title in Macmillan’s Remixed Classics Collection! Into the Bright Open is a twist on Secret Garden and takes inspiration from the author’s Indigenous heritage and offers an LGBTQ+ centered look at the tale. Read along for more info, and a chance to win a copy of the book!

As always, the schedule for this tour can be found on the side-scroller on the homepage until the tour has concluded, after which time it’ll be added below.

Book Info

Into the Bright Open

by Cherie Dimaline
Release Date: June 19, 2023
Publisher: Macmillan Kids
Genre: YA contemporary, retelling, LGBTQ+, historical fiction

Disclosure: by clicking the BUY NOW link you’ll be directed to the author’s website where you can chose which retailer to use to make your purchase!

Synopsis

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…

About the Author

Cherie Dimaline wins her first Governor General’s Literary Award in 2017 with The Marrow Thieves. She is an author and editor from the Georgian Bay Métis community whose award-winning fiction has been published and anthologized internationally. In 2014, she was named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and became the first Aboriginal Writer in Residence for the Toronto Public Library. Cherie Dimaline currently lives in Toronto where she coordinates the annual Indigenous Writers’ Gathering.
For info about Cherie, please visit her online at cheriedemilane.com

The publisher, Macmillan, has graciously agreed to partner with us to give away three (3) finished copies of the book! Please follow this link to enter: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/1e4a114d84/. Winner will be contacted by “info@turnthepagetours.com” and asked to provide US mailing address. Must be 18+ to enter or have parental permission to share address.