This season, two new novels for young people showcase the enduring resonance of touchstone texts. In What Lies Beneath the Flowers (Delacorte, out now), Natasha Díaz highlights the mysterious underpinnings of Charles Dickens’s 19th-century bildungsroman Great Expectations by reframing the story as a contemporary thriller. And in her forthcoming middle grade novel Little Monsters (Aladdin, Aug. 18), debut author Máire Roche reimagines the sisters at the heart of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women with a modern supernatural twist. We invited the authors to speak with each other about putting a fresh spin on familiar tales for today’s teen readers.

Natasha Díaz: Hi, Máire! I absolutely loved this book! While it has been some time, I read Little Women multiple times in my childhood, and you really found a way to capture Alcott’s storytelling but with such a creepy tone. With What Lies Beneath the Flowers, I found that the pressure of remixing a classic as well as shifting the story to a new genre required me to read the original as well as a bunch more books of the mystery/thriller variety.

How did you prepare for this book?

Máire Roche: Thank you! I loved What Lies Beneath the Flowers, and I was absolutely hooked. I also don’t see many Dickens retellings, and it was such a unique take on the original subject matter. I felt the same way about remixing a classic, like there is so much to live up to and entirely different genre conventions to think about, too!

As far as preparing for this book, I did some research on other retellings in various genres. I also did a lot of research on Salem! I don’t live there, but I’ve visited several times and getting the autumn atmosphere right was especially important to me. What kind of preparation did you do for What Lies Beneath the Flowers? Was there any research you had to do?

Díaz: Yes! I read Great Expectations—all 544 pages—for the first time! And then I reread some of my favorite thrillers—cough cough, all things Tiffany D. Jackson. Then I did a lot of flower research. I read through floral/gardening books and kept a log of flowers, and then when I came to a point in the story when I needed [my main character] Pippa to process a situation or figure out how she was feeling, I would search for a flower that experiences a similar situation in their lifetime, for her to reference and parse through.

Do you have siblings? How did that inform how you wrote this version of the March sisters?

Roche: I do have siblings—four of them! I’m the eldest daughter, so I definitely had a soft spot for Meg’s position in her family and the pressure she’s under. While my siblings didn’t directly inform Little Monsters, they did help me understand what an eldest daughter in Meg’s place might be experiencing.

In What Lies Beneath the Flowers, family and legacy are themes you spend some time exploring. What drew you to that in your work?

Díaz: I became a mother over the course of writing the book, so I was thinking a lot about what it means to be a mother and a daughter and how one informs the other, in both directions. I also wanted to talk about what home means and how your community can become that, even in the absence of a mother.

In your book, at times, Meg’s inner monster felt like a manifestation of the pressure and responsibility that was building inside of her and couldn’t be contained anymore. I had completely different home situations and I had no siblings, but I related deeply to the weight of responsibility she had to carry as a young person. Which of the sisters do you relate to most?

Roche: I love that the story resonated for you, and I hope it does for any young person who has felt the same way! It can be a lonely experience to have a lot of responsibility on your shoulders while all of your friends have a different experience of childhood. I definitely relate to Meg most, and I did even as a child when I read the original, so it was especially fun to get to tell her side of the story.

Díaz: How did you decide which type of “monster” got to live inside each sister? Were any of those decisions tied to their characters or traits from the original?

Roche: Yes, there were definite ties to Alcott’s original work! I actually wanted them to be directly tied to character flaws we see in the original. In Little Women, Meg spends a lot of time thinking about public perception and how people receive her, for good reason: she has a lot of pressure to marry advantageously, to save her sisters from poverty. In Little Monsters, she has a very visible monstrous response to her strong emotions. She can’t hide them, even though she very much wants to!

When you decided to write a retelling of Great Expectations, how did you decide what to keep and what to make your own? I loved that some of Dickens’s themes about class remain the same, but in a much more modern, feminist way in What Lies Beneath the Flowers.

Díaz: It was actually quite tricky! Great Expectations is so long and so much happens. I decided the best way for me to tackle it was to pull a few major plot points to nail down the trajectory of the story, but beyond that, I tried to keep the similarities mostly to the characters. My biggest critique of the original was that the female characters were undeserving of their less than positive depictions. Now, I love a messy character, but their morally greyness needs to feel earned, so I tried my best to fulfill that for this version of the story, especially with the women in the story.