28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Secret Garden is life, this book is poison, April 6, 2002
The Secret Garden is one of my very much beloved books, a testament to a more innocent time, a story of life, healing, forgiveness and the triumph over evil, depression and grief. The characters are described so well, you feel you know them inside and out when you're finished reading the book.
I wonder if Susan Moody ever read The Secret Garden, because she has these characters doing things I just can't even imagine them doing. The motivations are all contrived to suit the author's insistence on tawdriness. She seems to crank open your brain and pour into it all the vile things promoted in the past few decades: adultery, death in graphic description, angst, disrespect, lust, selfishness, and sickness. The opposite of what the Secret Garden is about.
The writing is fine, the mechanics are there, but the characters are not Mary, Dickon, and Colin. I can't see Colin calling out Dickon's name while he's in an intimate situation with Mary. I also had a hard time believing Colin was gay or bisexual. I also had a hard time believing Mary just fell into bed with Dickon with no commentary on how she professed her feelings for him or vice versa. I don't understand Dickon patronizing prostitutes, or having an affair with Mary while she is married to someone else. I don't see Mary jumping into marriage with a guy she hardly knows, when we ALL KNOW her heart is really with Dickon.
These characters were shameful. They seemed driven by evil itself, driven to destroy all the nurturing and life giving health the Secret Garden developed in them in the first book.
Too much time was spent describing Dickon's war experiences. I don't need to know that much about wounds, blood and maggots, thank you. Of course he was given Post Traumatic Stress disorder, because I believe the author couldn't think of anything else to flesh out his character with. Perhaps consulting the original book would give Ms. Moody a clue on how Dickon would have acted and spoken (anyone else notice his entire dialect was erased? Was it too much to ask that Moody preserve one of those charming things about this boy? I know it's a lot of research, but she could have gone the distance and at least shown us that she cared enough to try!)
I bought this book hoping for a continuation of the characters I truly loved from the original book, but what I witnessed here was their systematic pop-culture slaughter.
If I may quote a line from Red Dwarf which sums up this book, "You have no magnificence in your soul." Surely Ms. Moody has no magnificence in her soul; if she did, she would have held tightly to the innocence of these characters. Their friendship was true and not an excuse to make them use each other for sexual gratification.
This could have been a beautiful story about real love and friendship and bonds that we form in life. Instead, the characters were forced to turn away from the peace they'd achieved in the original story.
They can grow up and learn about the horrors of life without contributing to them. This is bad finfic and should have only been published someonwhere in the dark recesses of the internet. I can't believe a publisher paid for this. I can't believe I did, either.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Return to the Secret Garden, February 28, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Return to the Secret Garden (Paperback)
I have never been so disappointed in a book. I loved "The Secret Garden" and couldn't wait to get this book. What a letdown. I don't see how anybody could read the original and then make up such a terrible travesty of a good book. I could not read it all, and I hope readers will think twice before they try.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ghastly, November 13, 2000
I wonder if, in a hundred years, someone will write an adult "sequel" to the Harry Potter books, which would mutilate loved characters and situations and taint the original books. Pray that no one does. Because that is what Moody has done here. This book is trash--pure garbage.
Over the course of this book, she carefully mangles the characters so that they are hardly recognizable as the lovable kids who grow into friends in "Secret Garden." This book is written like a thousand other novels, in style and structure, and might not have been so horrible if she hadn't been using the original author's characters. Dicken, Colin, and Mary bear no resemblance to themselves.
I fully agree with Shelly Treadway--Burnett would have done virtually anything to keep something like this from being done with her characters (I know, because I have some of my own). The delightful promise, healing, and hope of "Secret Garden" have been carefully eradicated from this volume.
This book is a travesty, and should be universally banned. If you have had the misfortune to read it, I advise you to read the REAL story to clean your psyche and dismiss THIS as published fanfiction.
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