Poor Anne Tyler had an uphill job getting this reader on board here. I love Tyler’s work and am predisposed to admire anything she writes. (Favourite: The Amateur Marriage.) But I remain slightly uneasy about this new publishing trend for retreads of famous authors. And Vinegar Girl is a rewrite of The Taming of the Shrew as part of Vintage’s “Hogarth Shakespeare”, marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death: “The world’s favourite playwright. Today’s best-loved novelists. Timeless stories retold.” Is it me or is there something chilling about that fusion?

Vinegar Girl is the third in the series after Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (The Winter’s Tale) and Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (The Merchant of Venice). Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear are yet to come. (See what I mean?) This follows Penguin’s the Austen Project – “retellings” of Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld, and so on. I’m looking forward to the Proust one. Will Self at the ready?

While these might be great authors who write great books – and under their own steam they might well want to write something inspired by an existing work – the process of commissioning these works ramps up the pressure and gives the whole enterprise an artificiality that is hard to overcome. In some ways it’s a noble and bold gesture, potentially bringing new readers to the classics. But let’s admit that it’s also marketing gone mad.

Those reservations aside, Tyler had me (initially) by page 12. How to find a 21st-century update for a spinster who doesn’t want to marry? Try to push her into a green card marriage. Genius. Kate Battista is a reluctant pre-school teacher in Baltimore who lives at home with her ageing father, an academic. He is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. But he is also about to lose his brilliant eastern European young lab assistant, Pyotr, whose visa is about to expire. Unless …

You have to hand it to Tyler. This is just about as believable as it gets in terms of a modern way of rendering a Shakespeare plot. Which is sort of the problem. While Tyler has a lot of fun with it, it never rings entirely true or escapes what this is: an experiment in form. In her defence, Pyotr is a hugely appealing character: “He had the foreigner’s tendency towards bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse.” And the title? Pyotr: “In my country they have proverb: ‘Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.’” Kate: “Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” And we know that at some point he’s going to say, “Kiss me, Katya.”

The efforts of Kate’s father and of Pyotr to get Kate to go along with the plan are endearingly desperate in a way that feels authentic. Less so the depiction of Kate’s daffy younger sister, Bunny, who has to be a vegan so that she can be sympathetic to animal activism because this matters for the plot.

Maybe there’s fun to be had in working out how Tyler can stay true to the original while still creating something in her own voice. But instead of a tribute, it just feels like tying the hands of an author who’s perfectly capable of creating her own world and really doesn’t need to borrow someone else’s. No, not even Shakespeare’s. Verdict? Fun, accomplished, readable, enjoyable. But Anne Tyler originals do all this and so much more.

Vinegar Girl is published by Hogarth (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99