The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a wonderful classic book I could read again and again. My favorite section is where Colin has a revelation:
“He had known it before in a way, he had hoped it and felt it and thought about it, but just at that minute something had rushed all through him—a sort of rapturous belief and realization and it had been so strong that he could not help calling out. “I shall live forever and ever and ever!” he cried grandly. “I shall find out thousands and thousands of things. I shall find out about people and creatures and everything that grows—like Dickon—and I shall never stop making Magic. I’m well! I’m well! I feel—I feel as if I want to shout out something—something thankful, joyful!”
The orphaned Mary Lennox is sullen, ill tempered, and unloved when she’s sent to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven. A man consumed by grief over the death of his wife, Archibald has allowed his sprawling estate on the moors to fall into grim disrepair. It’s when Mary begins tending to her late aunt’s mysterious garden—locked up and neglected for years—that she discovers its life-changing secrets and a flowering rejuvenation of the human spirit.
Out of this dark, closed-off world and a child’s innate curiosity about life and death comes one of the most transformative coming-of-age novels ever written.
