![]() ![]() Like Mary, she begins to make friends, including with the crying boy. Hidden away in a drawer in her bedroom she discovers some old notebooks, the diary of another lonely, grouchy child, Mary Lennox. She meets a gardener, Mr Sowerby, with a scarred face and a metal leg, who scares her at first, but shows her kindness and tells her about the plants. Then she finds a secret garden, and a friendly robin. The undisguised dislike of Mrs Craven's son Jack, home from boarding school because of illness, makes it all worse. Despite the welcome of Mrs Craven and the other adults at the Manor, a sharp contrast to the attitudes of the orphanage staff, Emmie finds her new uprooted life as hard as her old one. ![]() ![]() A long and bewildering journey ends at Misselthwaite Manor, an enormous warren of a house set in empty countryside, something the orphans have never encountered before. When the orphanage is evacuated, even that solace disappears, her fights to take the cat in vain. Unattractive and grumpy, she is the object of derision, and lives a lonely existence, a starving cat her only company. We meet Emmie in Craven Home, a London orphanage, just before the outbreak of the second world war. Could it live up to its illustrious forebear? ![]() The Secret Garden is one of my all time favourite children's books and my master's dissertation was on Frances Hodgson Burnett, so I approached this new sequel by Holly Webb with much anticipation, but also a degree of trepidation. ![]()
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