The children are sent to Misselthwaite Manor, a countryside mansion full of countless dusty rooms and a kind, if busy, staff. But when the children of Craven Home are evacuated out of London because of the war, heartbroken Emmie is forced to leave sweet Lucy behind. The only friend Emmie Hatton has ever had at the Craven Home for Orphaned Children is Lucy, the little black kitten that visits her on the fire escape every day. So too is the way in which she brings back the magic of that secret garden and of the book in which we first met it."Return to the Secret Garden and enjoy the wonder of childhood and the magic of friendship in this sequel that is sure to warm the hearts of young readers everywhere"-Shelf AwarenessĪs she turned it the door creaked a little and opened inwards. Webb's cleverness with the plot is admirable. My qualms disappeared within the first few pages. Readers who know Burnett's book will be fascinated, and at times deeply saddened, by the adult lives imagined here for her characters, though the book works fine too as a stand-alone novel. And gradually she starts to make connections.Īs this synopsis shows, Webb successfully weaves elements of the original Secret Garden story into a moving tale of wartime and self-discovery. 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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