Monday, October 28, 2024. Cold and sunny out there, with temps in the low 50s yesterday but climbing up to 60 degrees today.
Last week Peter Brown co-hosted a book launch with Gretchen Kimball for their good friend Paige Peterson at his home on Central Park West. Gretchen is also a lifelong neighbor of Paige’s and very supportive of her work.
This is Paige’s 5th book. The first was with Christopher Cerf whom Paige co-authored and illustrated Blackie, The Horse Who Stood Still. Then there was Growing up Belvedere-Tiburon, a memoir of her simple childhood in Marin County, which Anne Lamott put succinctly – “I love Paige’s book. She captures the wild, natural beauty of our shared childhoods, when we got on our bikes after breakfast and didn’t come home till dinner, covered in blackberry juice and dirt, scatches and bliss.”
And now over the past three years, Paige and Jesse Kornbluth have produced an abridged and illustrated A Christmas Carol, Black Beauty, and The Secret Garden – the last of a trilogy.
The Secret Garden, originally written by Francis Hodgson Burnett, is a new addition to the collection of updated classic books for children by Jesse and Paige.
This turns out to be the favorite book of not just one generation, but of many. Readers remember the characters as if they were old friends: Mary, the frightened orphan sent to India to an ancient mansion in the English moors; Dickon, who can talk to the birds and make plants grown anywhere; and Colin, the physically challenged boy who’s spent his childhood in his bed.
All readers remembered cheering and weeping when Colin got out of his wheelchair and stood tall in the locked garden where his mother died and his endlessly sad father returns from yet another flight from his decade-long mourning and literally bumps into his son.
First published in England in 1911, it was a break with traditional story-telling that Colin’s ascent from his sickbed is engineered by an equally sad but very determined 10-year-old girl.
It was a huge success because the story is so straightforward; the characters are motivated by such simple desires and a very happy ending arrives exactly on schedule.
The novel was immediately popular and sold briskly but it was not considered English children’s literature – with elements too thorny for that time. The girl is the leader and the rich male landowner is depressed and often absent. And both Mary and Colin are wounded children who don’t make readers want to hug them.
The original novel is 80,000 words. This new version is 35,000 words with a vivid action plot and no loose ends; a classic that deserves to remain a classic.
