Secret Garden (version 4 dramatic reading)

The Secret Garden is that rare children's book that understands something essential about growing up: that grief and wonder often live in the same heart. When ten-year-old Mary Lennox is ripped from her life in India and deposited at her uncle's remote Yorkshire manor after a cholera epidemic kills her parents, she is a creature of resentment - sour, lonely, and unlovable. But then she discovers a door. Behind it lies a garden that has been locked away for ten years, its roses wild, its fountain silent, its walls a sanctuary only she can enter. As Mary tendrils into this secret world, she finds an ally in the earthy servant girl Martha and, eventually, her frail cousin Colin, a boy who has been told he will die. Together, the three children tend the garden back to life - and in doing so, heal something in themselves. Burnett's novel is a paean to the wild, restorative power of nature, but it's also a surprisingly dark story about the loneliness of childhood and the courage required to stop being bitter.