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The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I hadn't read it before, and I haven't seen the film(s?), but I knew it was about a little girl who was drawn to a garden she wasn't supposed to enter. I didn't expect it to be a sweet story with so much atmosphere about it. So yes, I think it's fair to say I loved this story. First, let's see if I can summarize this book in brief: The Secret Garden is the story of a young British girl raised in India by servants, but never knowing her parents. She grows up sickly and described as thin and yellow, and she becomes a little tyrant who cares for no one but herself and doesn't know happiness. (I was thrilled to find that this book is the source of the rhyme about "Mary, Mary, quite contrary," which the other children tease her with.) Because of her hatefulness, no one cares for her in return, so when she's ten years old and there's a cholera outbreak in the estate where she lives, she hides in her room and is forgotten; discovered days later as the only survivor. She's sent to live with her uncle in the Moors of England, who is also known as a cross, unfriendly individual. (No, I can't do this in brief, so I'm switching gears!) At this point in the book, I'm devoted to this little girl. She acts as though she's above everyone else, thinks she deserves to be waited on hand and foot, and that her rude – mean – behavior is acceptable, because no one has ever stood up to her. No one has loved her, either. She's a child who needs to discover life and happiness, and she finds it on the moors and in her Uncle's gardens. And when she feels happiness, it's like her personality explodes as she feeds the things she loves to retain those good feelings that are at first alien to her. I found this book delightful because somehow the atmosphere is set so that I could hear the wuthering winds on the moors and the birds singing in the spring, smell the rain and the earth as Mary and her new friends work in their secret garden, and visualize the roses gone wild over broken dead trees as though they were trellises, see the tiny tips of crocus breaking through the soil in the early spring. The excitement of the children is wonderful, and their enthusiasm about the magic of becoming stronger and "getting fat" made me smile. This book was written over a hundred years ago, and yet I didn't notice the difference in the language after the first few pages. I was drawn in. It might not be so for a lot of people, but I was well pleased with The Secret Garden. I only wish the ending had been drawn out a little longer.  |
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