We're neither of us goodlookin' an' we're both of us as sour as we look. 'Tha' an' me are a good bit alike,' he said. One of the first people Mary meets is the gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and the scenes between him and Mary in the beginning were sublime: Spoiled and sickly, Mary is a sour faced young brat who slowly starts to turn her lonely little life around. Precocious young Mary is orphaned in India and sent to live with her Uncle in his English mansion on the moor. I don't think publishers should be attempting to apply today's sensitivity standards retrospectively to a book published so long ago and I do hope The Secret Garden is safe from censorship in the future. As I write this, the media is full of articles about the censorship of Roald Dahl's books. While it's a shock to see words you wouldn't ordinarily read in children's dialogue published today, it's a timely reminder that this book was published more than 100 years ago in 1911. When reading The Secret Garden, a few words caught me by surprise, including the frequent use of the words 'fat' and 'ugly'. Thanks to you all for joining me, it was loads of fun! We were also joined by Andrea and Liz over on GoodReads. Joining me in the buddy read was: Veronica Joy - The Burgeoning Bookshelf, Ashleigh Meikle - The Book Muse (with her Grandmother's copy), Claire - Claire's Reads and Reviews and Suzie Eisfelder - Suz's Space. It's always fun to read a classic with a buddy so you can chat about it, but it turned out many of us have had this book sitting on our shelves for far too long! I was on holiday recently and put the word out to see if there were any fellow Aussie reviewers who'd like to do a buddy read for The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
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