Secret Garden Review

        The Secret Garden

I give the novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 3.5/5 stars. The first problem I had with it was how coincidental everything was. A dog randomly dug up the key and the robin randomly led Mary to the door?? It's super unrealistic. I think the process of finding the key and the entrance should have been way more difficult.

 Personally, I think that Mary should have been older so that there could be a romance between her and Dicken. Even if she'd put in a cute epilogue about them getting together, I would have been happy. There were WAY too many hints to love for her to just abandon it! Obviously, just my opinion though. 

I think it would have also been great if Martha hadn't always been perfectly sweet to Mary. I do understand that Martha's personality was kind and supportive but, after all the stuff Mary said, I think it would have been good to see her snap back. It would have given her more character development than just the caring older sister. 

The last issue I had with The Secret Garden was the pacing. It seemed to move slowly through unimportant details and rush through the action. One of the main points of the book was to show Mary and Collin's growth mentally and physically, but it felt a bit like she was forcing it. I think she could have done a better job with the showing and not telling when it came to those changes.

What I liked about the book was, the author did a fabulous job with imagery. Picturing the manor and garden was super easy because of her very detailed writing style. With a few minor changes to the plot and the tempo of the storyline, The Secret Garden would have been a 5/5.

Written by: Emmy Perkins