I'm Maddie. I'm a 13 year old girl and I live in Illinois, USA.
Here's my review of the book
The Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
What this book is about:
Mary Lennox was a disagreable and ugly child when her parents, who ignored her and left her in the care of her Ayah, died of the cholera at their home in India. So this sullen little girl is sent to Misselthwaite Manor, owned by her Uncle, in England.
There her life is very different then it was in India. She is given a pair of rooms to live in and is expected to either stay in the rooms or be outdoors. She is forbidden to explore the manor's hundred rooms but is left on her own most of the time.
Martha, one of the housemaids, brings her meals and cleans the rooms for her. Mary becomes friends with Martha but most of the time, Martha is too busy with a mysterious project to talk with her.
So Mary takes to going outdoors to see the many gardens on the manor's grounds. All of the gardens have walls around them to keep the critters out of them and Mary likes to go into them to see if things are beginning to grow. One day, she learns that one of the garden's has a secret.
Her uncle, Mr. Craven, gave that particular garden to his wife who was an exquisite gardener. There was a special tree in the garden that she liked to sit in and read her books. But one day the branch that she always sat on broke and Mrs. Craven fell. She died later that day. After her death, Mr. Craven was so mad with grief that he locked the door of the garden and buried the key so that no one else could ever enter it.
Mary is so intrigued by this story she sets out to find the key and the door. One day, she manages to find the key. Then, another day, she finds the door. What she finds is a dead garden.
Or so she thinks. As it is the dead of winter, nothing is growing so the garden appears dead to the little girl from India.
Then she befriends Dicken, Martha's brother who is an animal charmer and a fabulous gardener himself. Together, the two children work to make the garden come alive again.
And as they work, Mary changes. She is no longer the ugly, disagreeable girl that first arrived at Misselthwaite. Now she is quite lovely and lively. And she's happy. Genuinely happy for the first time in her life.
Apart from the fact that she's sure that Martha is keeping something from her. Mary can hear crying in the middle of the night. And one night, she decides she will find out the source of the crying. And she does.
Where is the crying coming from? Read this book to find out!
What I think about this book:
I absolutely love it. Some people might be daunted by the fact that it is so long but it is completely worth reading.
Where I got this book from:
The half-price bookstore.
Other books by this author that I like are:
Return to the list of the 15 newest reviews
Go here for a list of all your reviews sorted by title.
Go here for a list of all your reviews sorted by author.
Go here for a list of all your reviews sorted by series.