The Secret Garden

 

Disclaimer: Obviously, this is a detour from my planned summer reading list. I don't have a good excuse other than I really wanted to read this again. And I know the book photo I have posted here is a link to one of the Kindle editions, but this is the cover of the paperback that I own.

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 I don't know how many times I've read The Secret Garden. My parents have a gorgeous hardcover edition with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. As a child, I'm pretty sure my favorite thing about the book was the illustrations. Tasha Tudor's idyllic pictures showed me a world I wish I could have...even at the age of six.

Honestly, I could write an entire blog post on Tudor and why her illustrations and her stories have shaped me into the old-fashioned girl that I am. But I won't do that today!

Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote many books. I've only read a few of them; the other one I can remember at the moment is A Little Princess, which also happens to be a favorite.

Anyway, I won't go into the details of this book, because it's one that almost everyone has read at some point in their life. I just want to state that the theme of resurrection throughout the book is the best part. Mary and Dickon bringing the garden to life...Colin's whole body being healed...all of it is so beautiful.
Granted, I don't know if Burnett was a Christian or not. The inclusion of Magic in this book and her way of looking at nature makes me think maybe not, but it doesn't change the fact that this is a glorious little book and makes one feel very good inside.

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Children's literature from the Victorian era is such a happy place. Seriously. I think more children today (and adults, for that matter) ought to read books like this and take note of things. The world was more uptight then, but I don't think that was a bad thing. Obviously, I don't endorse everything about the Victorian era, but it seems to me that we could learn a thing or two about the morals and values they had.

The Secret Garden receives five stars from me, partly for nostalgia, but mostly because it is a well-written and wholesome story.

Go Ask Alice

I've had a copy of Go Ask Alice around for a few years now. It actually belongs to my friend Jenni and I will now finally be able to give it back to her because I finally remembered I had it and read it.

It was a quick read, and an insightful one. It's a book that was relevant when it was first released and is still relevant today, despite the differences in pop culture. The title comes from a song, which is referencing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have a big problem with this, though there's nothing I can do about it. Lewis Carroll was not on drugs. End of story.

But the thing is, the effects of drugs are still quite real and according to the descriptions in Go Ask Alice, they can seem like a wonderland while on them. The anonymous teenager who inadvertently ingests LSD at a party suddenly wants more and more of this feeling. She swings back and forth from wanting drugs to not wanting to have anything to do with them. This in the end totally ruins her life, which is the point of the story. There's not even much more to say than that many of the diary entries do truly read like a teenage girl's diary. Some of the things she is concerned about are thing I remember being concerned about at that age. So it's relatable, which makes it a good read for teens, especially girls.

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Go Ask Alice isn't a novel.
It isn't even the most well-written book ever.
But it's not supposed to be.
It's supposed to be a published diary of a teenage girl.
Those don't read like novels.
Trust me, I would know.
But the thing is, this anonymous teenager might have been real; her story might have been exactly this; might have been.
But I think it's heavily edited.
It could be nonfiction.
It could be fiction.
But none of that matters.
This is a tale of addiction and hopefully it has done its job of scaring teens (and adults, for that matter) off ever using drugs.
I know I never wanted to before reading this, but now I especially don't want to.

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So, I give it four stars. People now may complain it's outdated, with the nonexistent cell phones and the talk about hippies (hey, they still exist...), etc. But the message of the book is timeless, and no one should blow it off.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Though my preferred reading is traditional fantasy and classic novels, I will read what I deem an "experimental" novel from time to time.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one such novel. I call it experimental because this is not really written in traditional form. There are lots of photographs, bad grammar and punctuation, and even blank pages. There are two timelines in the book, and not until near the end do you realize that they will even intersect. And, though it's about a boy whose father died in one of the towers on 9/11, that part of the plot is not preachy or overdone.
In fact, it's hardly confronted outright, which I kind of found strange.

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Nine year old Oskar Schell is an only child who lives in New York City with his mother. His grandmother lives across the street. He is a Stephen Hawking fanatic, a vegan, an inventor, and many other things besides. He likes words such as extremely and incredibly; thus the title. He is very particular about everything. Doesn't sound much like a child, I'll admit, but in hindsight I think he's meant to have Asperger's. (It's never touched on, but his thought processes show it.) He is an atheist, because his father was one. He is only allowed to watch approved documentaries.
And he misses his father very much.
It's been two years since the attack, and Oskar is still grieving heavily. When he is exploring his father's closet, he accidentally knocks down a blue vase and it shatters, revealing an envelope that says "Black" in red pen and contains an odd looking key. Oskar feels very strongly that this is part of a scavenger hunt that he never finished, and hoping to find some truth about his father, Oskar sets out to find what the key fits.
He goes to the locksmith.
He goes to the craft store, because why would his father write "Black" with a red pen?
He visits almost everyone in the phone book with the surname Black.
Nothing.

In the meantime, Oskar's narrative is interrupted by narrative by someone who survived the bombing in Dresden almost a century ago. I don't want to reveal anything more about this narrator because it becomes extremely important later on.

What else am I supposed to tell you without giving away the (not very strong) plot?
Nothing, I guess.

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Does my meager summary make sense?
I suppose it wouldn't necessarily make sense to me if I were reading it and hadn't read the book yet.
But it's a better summary than what the book blurb says.
Maybe this is supposed to be a novel of healing and hope and acceptance of death in the face of life which may not seem worth living sometimes.
Maybe.
And while I felt some of that healing and hope at times, for the most part the novel was rather devoid of hope.
Oskar is an atheist, which means he doesn't believe in an afterlife and he also believes that life is all random chance and that maybe there isn't a point to anything.
How does a novel like this, with no proper ending, point to hope????
Some people said they cried so hard while reading this.
I didn't.
In a way, I think perhaps the whole 9/11 aftermath was a gimmick.
In a way, I think the real story is about this key that Oskar finds.
And even about the other narrator who I still won't name, and how he fits in with Oskar's life.
This book should be labeled as a mystery of sorts, because that's a lot of what it is.

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Don't get me wrong.
I liked this book a lot.
Enough that I'm not annoyed that I bought a copy before reading.
I just didn't love it.
When you're trying to write a novel that supposedly deals with grief and hope, maybe you shouldn't talk about atheism and evolution and random chance so much.
There's no hope in that.
I don't care what you think, Jonathan Safran Foer; your book isn't necessarily about hope.
Sorry.

As far as the experimental storytelling goes, it was excellent.
I think it's fun to experiment with typography while telling a story, because it makes the reading experience that much more interesting.
Read it for yourself; maybe you'll find something in it that I didn't.
If anything, I'll read it again in the future and see if it speaks to me in a different way.

So, three stars for this.
Also, I hope the movie version actually did the writing justice.