Customer Reviews

Return to the Secret Garden

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I am a thirteen year old who found this book in the young adult section of a bookstore. I normally try and avoid sequels of great books that are not written by the same author (I had such horrors with Scarlett, the sequel to Gone with the Wind) but I decided to buy it anyway. Big mistake. I finished it only because I always finish books I begin, but it was a terrible waste of time and extremely inappropriate for my eyes. I wouldn't dare show this book to my mother, because if she saw what I had been reading, god knows what she'd do to me.
Between the vividly described violence and sex, this book is probably something you should find in the restricted section of a library or the romance section of a bookstore. I wonder how this twisted woman could possibly have tortured another author's charcters in such horrible ways and still be able to live with herself.
Scarlett, compared with this piece of garbage, is great literature.

I can't believe ANYONE could read this book and like it. The cover reads "for anyone who gre up loving Mary, Dicken, and Colin..." and it should finish "...you'll be really sorry if you read this book." Life has its share of pain and sorrow, butthis author took beautiful characters and gave them such bleak sorrow-filled lives that it was painful to read. And now that image is stuck in my head; when I think of the Secret Garden it makes me remember sadness instead of the joy that the first book rang with. Shame on Susan Moody! WHen you write a sequel to a children's book as beloved as the Seceret Garden, try not go for every cheap theatrical trick that you can. Make it realistic, but not through and through misery. These characters were miserable and ashamed throughout the book! I would beg anyone, PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! It will ruin the magic for you.

I just finished reading "Return to the Secret Garden" and, after getting over my dismay, decided to write my review of this novel. This is the worst sequel I've ever read. I actually think Laura Kalpakian's "Cosette" was better, and that's not saying much.

For one thing, the author has taken all the joy and innocence of the original and changed the story into a tawdry romance novel. Granted, the story might work if it stood on its own, but as a "sequel" to "The Secret Garden?" The characters bear very little resemblance to the originals, and there are some jarring differences; for example, Mary Lennox has grown into a spoiled, selfish woman not unlike her mother.

However, the most appalling aspect of this novel was not the characterizations or the story. (For the most part the author appears true to the turmoil of the time period, following our characters through both World Wars and into the early 1950s.) What is perhaps most disturbing is reading about how the child characters we all remember so well have all grown up immoral, and in such graphic detail. One might have expected a romantic love triangle between the three main characters when reading a sequel (and to this I would have also said to leave well enough alone, but I know it would have been done anyway) but I doubt anyone would have been prepared to read about their explicit and intimate multiple love affairs. At times, I thought I was going to be ill.

I've read "Scarlett" and "Cosette", and while I believe sequels to great novels are generally of a lesser quality, those sequels did not distress me as much as "Return to the Secret Garden". Perhaps because the originals (and thus the sequels) were written for adults. Reading this novel was like the equivalent of having someone take a beloved children's tale like "Goldilocks & the Three Bears" and writing a mature-audience sequel where Baby Bear is molested, Papa Bear a crack addict, Mama Bear a prostitute and Goldilocks returns to the woods with an Uzi and kills them all in bloody gory detail. And then having the backad of the book say "for those who loved `Goldilocks' as a child, you'll love the sequel as an adult!" It's just not the same story anymore.

Overall, I would like to say that this novel totally betrays the spirit of the original. I know this review will probably end up inciting more people to read this book out of curiousity. To that then I would not recommend it for those under 18. This sequel is more suitable as a volume in the V.C. Andrews set then as a sequel to Frances H. Burnett's "The Secret Garden!"END

I didn't really like this book. But before anyone thinks it has anything to do with the original book, I should tell you I have not read "The Secret Garden." I saw one of the movies once, but the story holds no special childhood memories for me. So when I checked this book out at the library,I was looking only for an entertaining read. Alas, entertaining it was not. One of my biggest pet peeves in any story are characters who do not act in realistic ways and who there seems to be no reason for their behavior other than to further the plot. There were many instances in this book in which characters behaved in strange ways and made odd decisions with no explanations given. And to be honest, the plot was pretty dull and predictable. It was one of those books where you just knew that anything a character could do to worsen their situation, they would. And of course it involved every cliche known to man: The unhappy marriage, post tramatic stress disorder, love triangle, anti-war sentiments, staple gay character, suicide, marriage of convenience, love between different classes, who's the daddy? and the list goes on. Someone should tell the author that stuffing a book full of trite plot turns does not equal a good story.

I was excited about beginning this book, so much so that I reread the Secret Garden in preparation. After less than a hundred pages of Return, I seriously wondered if Moody had bothered to reread the Secret Garden before writing. The only sembelence it bears to the original is the names and the location. I found it disturbing that Moody was able to turn such an uplifting children's book into such a depressing adult novel. I would recommend this work to anyone who dispised the Secret Garden, becuse they will be the only ones who will even remotely enjoy it. If possible, I would have given it no stars.

I'm 14 and have read sooo many books, from The Boxcar Children to War and Peace. "Return to Secret Garden" was the worst book I have ever read. It ruined the original story for me. It started off ok, but Susan Moody didn't waste any time in destroying the book. I can understand how Dickon went somewhat crazy after the war. But Mary and Colin? Mary is nothing better than a whore, and Colin becomes gay! I find it disturbing that Mary's first husband married her simply because she looked like her mother, with whom he had been in love. Her behavior toward her child was cruel, and totally different from the personality of Mary formed in the original. At the beginning of "The Secret Garden" I admit that Mary was a bit of a brat. But she grows out of that, then speedily becomes the brat she once was in Susan Moody's sequel. She would not have treated her own child in the exact way her own mother treated her. Colin is also disapointing. After he marries his cousin--very nasty--Mary finds out he is gay when she is carrying his child! Dickon is not the charming, lovable boy read about in the original. Mary refuses his offer of marriage because he is below her in social status. After reading this book a few months ago, I was strongly disturbed, and still am. If you love "The Secret Garden," DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!!! It will ruin the magic felt in the original book.

Words alone cannot express just how horrific this novel is. PLEASE, if you are considering buying it, DON'T! Don't get it cheap used, don't get if from a library, don't even flip through it in the check-out line! This book--and I use the term loosely--will absolutely ruin the original for you. I don't know how Susan Moody sleeps at night knowing that she wrote this work of artifice, but if she had any sense she would fight tooth-and-nail for a recall and have all of the books destroyed, just to prevent the further ruination of her reputation. I hereby volunteer to light the match!