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.
Secret Garden Chapter 6 doesn't quite follow up on the horror or mystery vibe that was
set at the end of Chapter 5 that like spiked and caught my attention and wanted me to keep
reading or got me to want to keep reading.
But Mary does explore the house because she wants to find out what's going on and it's
pretty interesting.
It's like simple, like nothing major happens except at the very end of the chapter she
finds something that Mrs. Medlock is not happy that she found and Medlock tells her you didn't
find anything, you didn't see anything, you didn't hear anything and if you know what's
good for you, you won't talk about it anymore and you'll stay in your room.
She also talks about her getting a governance, she threatens to box her ears which I specifically
remember from the movie because I had no idea at the time what that meant and I asked what's
that mean and I'm pretty sure my parents just said some form of spanking.
How do you spank someone's ears?
Anyway, so that's interesting.
I find it especially interesting that in one of the rooms, well two things that are interesting,
she finds a portrait of a little girl who kind of reminds her of herself.
She's got sharp curious eyes and she's a little stiff and she sees her in two different rooms.
At least one of the rooms has this cabinetry, I don't know if it's like a China cabinet
deal or a type of deal where there's a glass so you can look through it and see what's
in there.
Anyway, there's this cabinet that has all these little elephants in it.
She knows a lot about elephants because of being in India, she says or the narrator says,
and I feel like she's seen these Indian elephant figures in India before and she assumes that
they got left behind.
She mentions that all her books were left behind in India so maybe everything else was
as well.
I kind of remember the movie there being a relic that she has and it matches something
that the character we'll meet later in the book has.
I don't know if that's legit or if they just rolled it all in to compress it or turning
a five hour long book into an hour and a half long movie or whatever.
I don't think it was more than 90 minutes probably.
It was the 90s, they didn't do super long kids movies.
But I don't know that that's going to happen here but I got all excited because I thought
oh, that's from the movie!
Maybe it's not, maybe it's exclusively from the movie, it's not going to have any significance
here but it was interesting.
She's complained about not having anything to play with before and now that she has these
glass, I think glass porcelain or whatever, beautiful elephant things to play with she's
all excited about it and figures that's something she should do and she does it until she gets
tired of it.
Then she nicely arranges them all back and puts them in their place and then leaves.
But because the house is so big she gets turned around and that's when she finds that there's
a tapestry and when she touches the tapestry she finds there's a door behind it and she
goes to open the door and before she can do that Medlock gets to her and she's coming
jangling with all her keys to stop her from doing whatever she's doing, opening this door
and that's when she yells at her and tells her no you didn't see anything, you didn't
hear anything and away with you to your room.
She mentions that Craven has talked about getting her governess to look after her and she says
like she basically she implies, the implication is I'm going to talk to the master and get
this governess to look after you because you're too much trouble and anyway it's pretty interesting.
So again we're having a culture clash in a couple ways of she wasn't raised with authority,
respect, asking people permission for things, she was just raised with getting and taking
and doing whatever she wanted to and also being attended to and having her Aya being
always on top of her to the point where she was irritated with her and didn't want to
have her around anymore and now she's just so free to do whatever she wants that's having
unintended consequences for the people who are there and of course they're not thinking
about what it was like for her in India, they're just thinking about what it's like for anybody
there and they're operating as if she's an English born and bred kid in an English noble
house or wealthy house or whatever, manor house let's just say for argument's sake and
they don't really know how to handle her so it's causing a little bit of issue and I'm
sure that will continue so let's keep going through this book chapter by chapter and seeing
what happens and seeing how things develop with Mary and everybody else she's interacting
with.
Let me know what you think about this chapter and the book as a whole and check out the
follow the link to find the playlist for me doing all of Secret Garden chapter by chapter
if I finish it, I dropped Maniac Magee there's no guarantee I won't drop Secret Garden but
you can at least follow the link and look for it and if you go to the real important
link which takes you to mjwins.com my website you can find everything I do there, I'll have
a Secret Garden page or like master post type thing that will have that says whether or
not it's completed or ongoing or incomplete or what and there's also should be one of
those for all the other books I've covered on fortress fiction chapter by chapter so
far so go check it out.
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 visit MJMunoz.com
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