Sequels

A while ago it was announced that the British children's author Geraldine McCaughrean is going to write an 'official' sequel to Peter Pan. We have a couple dozen of her titles in the library, mostly myths and retellings. I read her juvenile novel The Kite Rider, a historical set in China at the time of Kublai Khan, to see what she's like. It was a good solid story, but it's hard to imagine she can channel J. M. Barrie.
       These days many kinds of novels come in series, so that if we don't want to let go of a character we can spend more time with them over and over, by the hand of the original author. But borrowing other authors' characters remains a respectable if not always successful literary move. Jean Rhys wrote a novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, from the point of view of the unlucky Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Lots of people have borrowed Sherlock Holmes, including Michael Chabon in his 2004 novel about a boy, a parrot, and the great detective, The Final Solution: a Story of Detection. Gone With the Wind has an authorized sequel, Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett, and a seriously unauthorized parallel story, The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall.
       A number of sequels to Frances Hodgsdon Burnett's The Secret Garden have appeared, though the library doesn't have any of them in the collection. Someone once donated a beat-up paperback of a sequel written for adults--Mary Lennox as a middle aged woman estranged from her children and she had married Colin and should have married Dickon or perhaps vice versa--and it was really terrible. (I can say so since I don't remember either author or title...) We do have a sequel to Heidi, Heidi Grows Up by Charles Tritten. I haven't dared look at it.