The Secret Garden blog post #1

Title: The Secret Garden

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Genre: Historical Fiction

Number of pages: 53/311

At the beginning of the book we meet with the protagonist - Mary Lennox. She is 10 years old, has ugly face, with skin made yellow by constant illness. She lives in India. Basically nobody likes her and she doesn't like anybody. Mary has been raised by many servants because her mother actually didn't want any children. One day a cholera epidemic breaks out in the indian village but Mrs. Lennox decides not to flee in time to escape the cholera because she is preparing a dinner party. On the morning when the epidemic finally strikes the Lennox family, Mary's servant is not here to help her. The fact that her Ayah has died of the cholera does not bother Mary at all. After all, the house is abandoned and Mary is the only one there. She goes in her room and stays there, crying, for more than a day.When she awakes, a small green snake with glittering eyes is the only living creature besides Mary herself left in the bungalow—everyone else, including her parents, has died or fled. At the end British soldiers finds her there and takes the newly-orphaned child away with them. 

Mary is sent to live with English priest and his five children. Basically no one of the children likes Mary. They all make fun of her and give her funny nicknames. The best of the children once informs Mary that she is going to be sent to England to live with her uncle - Archibald Craven. She also hears that her uncle  is a hunchback and hermit who lives in a mysterious, rambling old house in the middle of nowhere. Since the priest has decided to leave his children to a boarding school he leaves Mary in London on his way back. That is how Mary is left in her uncle's housekeeper - Mrs. Medlock. She takes train to Yorkshire along with Mary and tell her stories about her uncle. She says that his wife's dead has been the end of any possibility of happiness. In Yorkshire the travelers meet Archibald Craven's servant who tells them that he doesn't want to see them. The housekeeper shuts Mary up in a room all by herself. On the next morning Mary meets another servant - Martha. The women greets Mary and then the two girls start talking. However, Martha is very casual at her speech and she talks to Mary as though the two were equals. Mary then asks the servant to help her get dressed and Martha is shocked.  It had never occurred to her that the child might not be capable of dressing herself. But after a few minutes she agrees to help her dress. Later Mary talks about her family - mother father and 11 siblings.

Martha shares with Mary that there is a secret garden hidden in the manor but when Mrs. Craven died the uncle locked the garden and buried the key. When Mary hears that she decides to find that garden. 

Couple of weeks passed and through each one of them Mary tries to find the secret garden. she sees a robin (bird) and she wonders if it is living in the garden however Mary cannot find the door. In the meanwhile Martha tells the girl more stories about the garden even though Archibald Craven has forbidden anybody to talk about that. At the end of the chapter Mary hears a baby crying but Martha denies hearing any such sound, though Mary does not believe her.

I thought that I am not going to like this book because I do not like Historical Fiction at all but the book looks very interesting and it is also easy to read. I like how it begins and the details that the author gives about the characters. For now, I like the protagonist and I cannot wait to read another 40 pages and to see what will happen with her. The first five chapters basically fulfilled my expectations. I really don't know what to expect but I know that Mary will find a way to enter the secret garden. 

Passage: "The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite."

I like the passage because it shows that the secret garden is the only thing that Mary seems to like. Also, by this chapter, we can notice that the garden and Mary are very alike. The garden has been closed 10 years go. Nobody cares about it now and nobody likes it. Mary is 10 years old but from the moment when she was born nobody liked her, including her mother, and nobody seems to care about her.