This is MJ, I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
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Prepare yourself for some off-the-cuff book talk as I tackle another middle grade book, Chapter by Chapter.
It's been a while since I've done a Chapter by Chapter. I believe this is number 25.
I'm going to be talking about The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson...Hodson...Hod...Hod...
Francis Hodgson Burnett.
This is Chapter 1 of the book I'm talking about.
And it was good, it was a great start.
I like that we get to know a couple things about our character, Mary Lennox, I believe is her name.
We get to know a couple things about her that are important that will, I would imagine, affect or set the tone for the story.
And I love that the author totally does not pull her punches.
She basically frames this little girl as having belonged to two parents who were stationed in India.
They were well off, I guess, relatively speaking.
Her mother preferred parties and nice clothes, and she was beautiful but distant, literally physically and emotionally distant from her daughter, Mary Lennox.
Her father, we don't really hear too much about him.
What was effective to me is that, one, we know that she gets moved to, I think, her uncle's house, it says, in England.
And that before then, she was the little mistress, the little tyrant of...by the time she was six years old, she was a tyrant.
I don't know if she's six years old when her parents die or not, spoilers.
But she has a servant lady who she calls by whatever name, Indian name for nurse or maid or nanny or whatever.
And it says that she's upset that she's not there to take care of her, and she'll call her a pig and a daughter of a pig,
because that's the worst thing you can call somebody.
Anyway, this is a nasty little girl. She's had an emotionally distant mother.
She's had a nanny or whatever who's cared for her for all these years.
But the nannies and whatever staff they have, their only job has been to keep her away from her mother so that she doesn't bother her mother.
That's not very nice. That's a very poor reflection on her mother.
And consequently, it makes sense that it would change her in such a way that she's not a very nice person.
She's not polite. She's expecting to get her way.
And she's even...she lacks understanding.
So she doesn't understand that when everybody has cholera that they're dying.
And she's mad at her nurse, her main nurse, because she went and got the cholera and is not able to take care of her.
And she's not, you know, hoping and wishing and praying for her speeding complete recovery.
She's instead irritated that the lady isn't there to take care of her.
And that's really sad. It's really sad and it's really unfortunate for her as a person.
But fortunately for us, she's a character in a book, not a person.
And the book does a very good job of framing her as this beastly little selfish girl
who is that way for understandable circumstances or understandable reasons.
It does not condone her behavior. It doesn't praise it. It doesn't set it in any good light.
It also isn't overly chiding of it and isn't completely attacking her in a way that will be like moralizing or preaching or anything like that.
It just says, hey, these are the facts. This is what this girl is like.
This is a little bit of her context so you can understand why she's like this.
And it's not a good thing. And that circumstance changes.
And you can understand why. You can understand where she came from, that she's disagreeable, that she's sickly, that she's bratty, whatever.
And that's all going to change or you would think it's going to change throughout the course of the book.
So far the movie is nothing like the book, which is interesting. And that happens.
So I'll be really curious to see what exactly happens in The Secret Garden and how things are for Mary Lennox when she arrives at her uncle's house in the book
and how she changes throughout the book. I'm assuming she'll change. We'll see if she doesn't.
She's very dislikable and disagreeable right now.
And at the very end of the chapter, this really impacted me for some reason.
She'd seen a snake crawling through her house, which is India, the jungle, you know, so I guess that's understandable.
And she wasn't afraid of the snake, which is kind of interesting.
And she wondered if she and the snake were the only things alive in the house because the house was quiet.
She drank a bunch of wine that she didn't know was white wine.
She drank a bunch of white wine that she didn't realize was alcohol because it was sweet.
And she fell asleep for hours and everybody was gone. They all left her.
So who knows what happened? Maybe we'll get more revelation on that. I think it doesn't matter.
I think it just turns out that her parents did die. Everybody got sick and died.
And probably because she was drunk asleep, she was spared from that. So that's really interesting.
There's kind of like a like a hand of fate kind of thing that saved her.
Well, it didn't save anybody else. And I don't know if that's going to factor into the overall story or not.
But it is something I did notice here. And anyway, she's alone with this snake.
So it's like it says that she thought she and the snake were the only ones in the house and that they were alone together.
And then at the end, the narrator says, and she was alone with that snake.
And it was just the two of them like she thought, even though there was like a couple of military guys.
I don't know. But, you know, military people who were there who are going around and clearing the houses and making sure everything is OK after this cholera outbreak.
And apparently the cholera outbreak happened to this family and like her mother and father died because her mother wanted to go to a particular party, fancy party.
And that's her weakness. And well, sure enough, it's not only a weakness, it's super effective.
And she ended up dying from it. So anyway, that's kind of sad and interesting.
And I got a flash in my mind. This was published in 2011, by the way.
I got a flash in my mind that something about this mother reminds me of Mrs. Darling.
But then again, something about this mother. Well, but then she's distant and cold as well.
Whereas Mrs. Darling loves parties and loves fashion and loves to keep up with the neighbors while it's more so Mr. Darling from Jane Barry's Peter Pan, that is.
But, you know, she definitely loved her children much more than this lady seems to have loved her child.
But we don't get enough of her perspective to tell. We don't get enough context to tell exactly what's going on.
So it's very interesting. It's kind of it's not a mystery, but it is.
It's not a tragedy, but there are tragic and mysterious elements to it so far.
And it's an engaging chapter. And I'm excited to see where exactly this goes.
I hope you enjoyed that. Please remember to like, share, subscribe.
I invite you to comment, ask questions and share your thoughts with me.
It's always more fun when you're part of the conversation.
Until next time, keep reading, be well and do good things.
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