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This is MJ, I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.

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Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.

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Prepare yourself for some off-the-cuff book talk as I tackle another middle grade book, Chapter by Chapter.

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It's been a while since I've done a Chapter by Chapter. I believe this is number 25.

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I'm going to be talking about The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson...Hodson...Hod...Hod...

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Francis Hodgson Burnett.

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This is Chapter 1 of the book I'm talking about.

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And it was good, it was a great start.

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I like that we get to know a couple things about our character, Mary Lennox, I believe is her name.

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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.

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And I love that the author totally does not pull her punches.

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She basically frames this little girl as having belonged to two parents who were stationed in India.

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They were well off, I guess, relatively speaking.

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Her mother preferred parties and nice clothes, and she was beautiful but distant, literally physically and emotionally distant from her daughter, Mary Lennox.

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Her father, we don't really hear too much about him.

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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.

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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.

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I don't know if she's six years old when her parents die or not, spoilers.

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But she has a servant lady who she calls by whatever name, Indian name for nurse or maid or nanny or whatever.

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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,

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because that's the worst thing you can call somebody.

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Anyway, this is a nasty little girl. She's had an emotionally distant mother.

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She's had a nanny or whatever who's cared for her for all these years.

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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.

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That's not very nice. That's a very poor reflection on her mother.

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And consequently, it makes sense that it would change her in such a way that she's not a very nice person.

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She's not polite. She's expecting to get her way.

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And she's even...she lacks understanding.

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So she doesn't understand that when everybody has cholera that they're dying.

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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.

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And she's not, you know, hoping and wishing and praying for her speeding complete recovery.

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She's instead irritated that the lady isn't there to take care of her.

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And that's really sad. It's really sad and it's really unfortunate for her as a person.

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But fortunately for us, she's a character in a book, not a person.

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And the book does a very good job of framing her as this beastly little selfish girl

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who is that way for understandable circumstances or understandable reasons.

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It does not condone her behavior. It doesn't praise it. It doesn't set it in any good light.

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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.

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It just says, hey, these are the facts. This is what this girl is like.

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This is a little bit of her context so you can understand why she's like this.

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And it's not a good thing. And that circumstance changes.

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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.

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And that's all going to change or you would think it's going to change throughout the course of the book.

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So far the movie is nothing like the book, which is interesting. And that happens.

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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

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and how she changes throughout the book. I'm assuming she'll change. We'll see if she doesn't.

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She's very dislikable and disagreeable right now.

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And at the very end of the chapter, this really impacted me for some reason.

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She'd seen a snake crawling through her house, which is India, the jungle, you know, so I guess that's understandable.

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And she wasn't afraid of the snake, which is kind of interesting.

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And she wondered if she and the snake were the only things alive in the house because the house was quiet.

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She drank a bunch of wine that she didn't know was white wine.

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She drank a bunch of white wine that she didn't realize was alcohol because it was sweet.

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And she fell asleep for hours and everybody was gone. They all left her.

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So who knows what happened? Maybe we'll get more revelation on that. I think it doesn't matter.

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I think it just turns out that her parents did die. Everybody got sick and died.

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And probably because she was drunk asleep, she was spared from that. So that's really interesting.

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There's kind of like a like a hand of fate kind of thing that saved her.

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Well, it didn't save anybody else. And I don't know if that's going to factor into the overall story or not.

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But it is something I did notice here. And anyway, she's alone with this snake.

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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.

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And then at the end, the narrator says, and she was alone with that snake.

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And it was just the two of them like she thought, even though there was like a couple of military guys.

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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.

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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.

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And that's her weakness. And well, sure enough, it's not only a weakness, it's super effective.

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And she ended up dying from it. So anyway, that's kind of sad and interesting.

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And I got a flash in my mind. This was published in 2011, by the way.

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I got a flash in my mind that something about this mother reminds me of Mrs. Darling.

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But then again, something about this mother. Well, but then she's distant and cold as well.

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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.

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But, you know, she definitely loved her children much more than this lady seems to have loved her child.

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But we don't get enough of her perspective to tell. We don't get enough context to tell exactly what's going on.

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So it's very interesting. It's kind of it's not a mystery, but it is.

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It's not a tragedy, but there are tragic and mysterious elements to it so far.

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And it's an engaging chapter. And I'm excited to see where exactly this goes.

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I hope you enjoyed that. Please remember to like, share, subscribe.

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I invite you to comment, ask questions and share your thoughts with me.

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It's always more fun when you're part of the conversation.

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Until next time, keep reading, be well and do good things.

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Visit MJMunoz.com for more of my work and help me build up the fortress fiction.

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Thank you.

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You

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You