With mother’s day just passing, I find myself reminiscing and missing more the things I use to do with my mom rather than past ways we celebrated the holiday. One of my fondest—and also possibly the nerdiest—is when we use to go to the library to rent VHS tapes. They were free but there was a limit of how many you could take out at a time and we were each allowed to pick just two of three. You might think two or three is a relatively large number for a nine year old but when you live in a house without cable a VHS tape is worth more in its ounces than gold!

My point is that it was on one of these public library treasure hunts that I first stumbled across The Secret Garden, an enchanting mysterious tale of a young girl who befriends a sickly boy and has magical adventures in a long forgotten garden. I watched the movie, completely enchanted to the point where I ended up having my mom hunt down the book for me and it is a piece of literature that I still re-read today as a twenty-something.

It seemed like a wonderful splash of serendipity when I found The Misselthwaite Archives—a web series adaptation of that same beloved novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s that recreates the characters in a fresh modern way—on Youtube.

I was drawn in almost immediately when I realized this inventive adaptation bumps the characters ages up from adolescents to disgruntled teens, swaps a manor for an academy and the cholera that kills the original heroine’s family for a sudden accidental car crash.

I normally shy away from modern takes on classic tales, but this looks good—really good—and I’m actually kind of giddy that I found it while it’s still airing weekly!

Watch new episodes Wednesdays and Fridays at 9am on YouTube, and find all their multimedia accounts at MisselthwaiteArchives.com.