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4.19 AVERAGE
4.19 AVERAGE
i absolutely love this book. a perfect combination of fantasy and reality that i read over and over again when i was younger.
Different than I remembered, but still an enjoyable story.
I read this book because the movie is one of my favorites. I was not disappointed. There are quite a few changes, including giving Sara more of a childlike personality rather than the angel they display her as in the movie, which I definitely appreciated.
I believe this book - one of my absolute favorites as a child - has laid the groundwork for some of my favorite plots/themes in future fiction.
I still require that the oppressor of the protagonist receives their comeuppance!
I still require that the oppressor of the protagonist receives their comeuppance!
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
This is an old favorite, and it will always be so. I first read A Little Princess when I was seven-years-old, and it is a story that I come back to, again and again, almost once annually since I first finished it. The prose and the story are gripping. I find Sara to be such a believable character, full of imagination, wonder, and striving to believe even when things become impossible. I lose myself in the imagery, and when I come up again, I feel happy this book exists in the world.
So disappointed in this one. I read it because the film was my absolute favourite as a child, but I didn't really like the book.
This is no The Secret Garden, but of course the comparison is unfair, especially since I have nostalgia for one but not the other. This is bigger, with an almost campy contrivance and predictability, as the reader is let in on secrets far ahead of the protagonist. But that's just what grew on me: Burnett's willingness to intrude on the narrative, to explicate and to remove the veil of suspense just when it grows too thin, is great fun, the narrator almost a character itself, tamping down the sentimentality. I love a story of isolated-but-romanticized suffering, and self-romanticization certainly fulfills that niche; I probably would have liked this better as a young reader but, hey, better late than never.
So I loved this story and all, and still go back to re-read portions, but has anyone noticed that the author can't do math? We're told Sara arrives at the school at seven ("a wardrobe much too grand for a child of seven") and that she spends the next ten years wealthy and treated more like a "distinguished guest" than a student. Which should put her at age 17 when her fortunes change. Yet we're told that she learns of her father's death at her eleventh birthday party. Also, if the ten-year timeline is followed, if Lavinia starts out at age thirteen, she would have been in her twenties when Sara went to live in the attic, and unlikely to still have been a student at the school, and at that point Lottie should have been in her teens and thus able to keep a secret.
A Little Princess is a guilty pleasure... pleasure because the writing is sweet and evocative, but guilty because Sara Crewe, while presented as an ideal young woman--imaginative, intelligent, polite, sensitive--is kind of horrible. [spoilers[ The end sequence, which begins with Sara nearly starving and ends with the Indian manservant of a rich white man decorating her garret with lovely things and laying out a delicious supper, is indicative of the problem... there's a hot fire in Sara's grate after this, but instead of letting the scullery maid sleep in her room with the warm fire, Sara feeds her and sends her off with some extra blankets. The next day, she eats the cold dinner while the scullery maid starves, but it's never addressed. And then the aforementioned rich man and his rich solicitor are so overwhelmed with joy that Sara is the girl they've been looking for, but like... they've been noticing her tatters and rags and thin, drawn appearance for a while, and done nothing--because "there are many like her." Only when it turns out she's actually a rich girl in disgrace to they extend friendship to her. So.... what.