The book that I choose to read for my first nine weeks is, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This book is about a ten year old girl named Mary Lennox. Her family dies and she has to move in with her uncle who lives in England. She ends up finding a secret garden that changes her life drastically. I choose to pick this book because from the back cover it gives off the feeling that there will be a great change in the main characters life.
Some of the things that I enjoyed about the book were the old language that was presented, how the main character makes a drastic change from her old life to her new one, and how the beginning started off with a bang. The old language really helps me get more of a visual of the time period that this book was meant for. I enjoyed the drastic change in the main character because it allows the book to have some kind of moral to the story. The bang that happened in the beginning of the book was that everyone that lived in the main characters house died, all but the main character. This let me have a more connected feeling with the main character.
What I disliked about the book was that her uncle Archibald Craven was never around. He allows Mary Lennox to come to his manor, but he is not there to greet her, or even tell her that he was sorry for her loss. I find this extremely rude because she is only ten years old. I also did not like how her uncle Archibald Craven never really cared for his son. It was not until the end of the book that he became passionate about his own son.
I would recommend this book to my friends because it is not a slow starting book. I think my friend would be able to get fully engaged into this book. It also has a great story line.
The author’s style in this book shows that the tone changes from gloomy to more chipper tone. At the beginning of the novel the other uses words that make Mary seem like some hideous monster of a kid. He calls her soured faced and spoiled, and then later on in the book he shows her in a brighter light by saying that she has red cheeks. The next thing that the other does is as the book goes on the author applies more dialogue. This shows that as the book goes on she becomes more personal with people. The different types of language that is used in my book are English and Yorkshire. The main language used is English, this is basically how people in America speak, there is no slang that we use today, but it’s a very formal English language. The people that use the Yorkshire language is Martha’s family and Martha at times, and example of it would be, “…If tha’ could print we could write a letter to him an’ ask him to go an’ buy th’ garden tools an’ th’ seeds at th’ same time…” (Page 70 from ‘The Secret Garden’) Martha tends to speak like this whenever she gets very happy, or anxious about something.
In short, I really enjoyed this book, the time period, and the story line.
