I was watching The Secret Garden the other day when I was visiting my aunt's house and I have come to the conclusion that children's stories today are really quite terrible. They have no imagination or creativity and they gloss over the realities of life. The Secret Garden was written in 1909 and dealt with sickness, death, and abandonment great detail. The words chosen for the story are not dumbed down for a slow reader and they story is not fluffed up with silly qualifiers about mediocrity and love or everyone. The Secret Garden was a hauntingly real story that many children could relate to at the time, and while the childhood tragedies on the 19th and 20th have changed and have all but disappeared, many of them are still the same hardships that children face everyday including death, abandonment, and relocation.
The movie done in 1993 was very true to the book, but even the modern film omitted some of the harder to understand aspects of the book. Maybe death by cholera is not as cinematicly appealing as a great earthquake, but it certainly is much harder n a child to understand a deadly sickness in a far away land. I do still think that this movie is well done and I find that I am seeing new things that were not as clear to me when I was five. The scene where Mary's mother abandons her infant daughter in the jungle is much more clear.
The Secret Garden was not the first of it's kind. Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were also classic children's stories dealing with adult issue and written for what would now be considered an eight grade reading level. Total fail on childhood literacy right there and overprotective parents.
Tonight I also have the hiccoughs.
You should watch American Beauty. Unless you already have. In that case you should write about it!
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