Module 2- The Secret Garden and The Outsiders

Summary
"The Secret Garden" tells of a young girl, Mary Lennox, who is unexpectedly sent to live with her distant relative in England after having lived in India.  Over the course of the book, Mary evolves from being a bored, neglected, and spoiled child into a vibrant, lively one.  This comes about as the result of her discovering a secret garden, as well as meeting various friends.  The garden is truly magical in the manner that it changes not only Mary, but those around her, bringing them together in ways that none of them could have imagined.

Burnett, F., & Tudor, T. (1962). The secret garden. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

My impressions
What a delight this book was!  I listened to a large portion of it in the car with my five-year-old twins while driving to and from school.  I wasn't sure how much they would be able to understand or how much it would hold their attention, but I was thrilled to find that they both asked to listen to the "Mary story" each time we got in the car.  They also learned so much new vocabulary and talked about what they thought the characters looked like.  One day after we got home, my daughter started carefully walking across the grass in our front yard, stooping down to listen.  When I asked what she was doing, she told me "I want to see if the grass makes my footsteps softer like it said in the story."  :)  To me, this is the sign of a true classic-- that a book written over a century ago, describing things that are so different from a reader's experience can still be engaging.

Reviews

Gray, B. (2011). The Secret Garden. School Library Journal, 57(5), 64.

Many laudable versions of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic have been recorded, and this is another worthy selection. Spoiled Mary Lennox is sent to the English moors to live in a mysterious mansion that holds many secrets. Classic characters such as Dickon, the almost magical gardener/animal whisperer, and Colin, the spoiled, sickly son of the house, grow to know and trust each other as well as Mary. Finola Hughes does a marvelous job with the Yorkshire accent, Colin's childishly peremptory remarks, and Dickon's peaceful mien. At the beginning, Hughes doesn't quite succeed in portraying Mary's self-centeredness and meanness, but as the girl begins to blossom, she becomes much more assured in her portrayal. The pacing is excellent and the production quality is very good. This enchanting production belongs in most library collections.

Radloff, L. (2008). The Secret Garden. Library Media Connection, 27(2), 69.

This new edition of Burnett's well-loved classic illustrated in ink and watercolor will stand up well against Tasha Tudor's 1930 version, and is much more engaging than some more recent editions. The story of Mary Lennox, Dickin, and Collin needs no retelling, but the size of the book, about one foot tall, and the new illustrations should be considered if newer versions of the story are needed. The illustrator, who lives in England, has captured the Victorian era in detail, the Yorkshire landscape, and the changes in the garden over time. The children, too, are more lifelike contrasting nicely with the sweetness of Tudor's illustrations and line drawings. The cover, with its embossed gold lettered title is a wraparound scene inviting the reader to enter into the garden along with Mary as she hears the robin's winter song. There are nice details in the other drawings, particularly the flowers, even if some of the animals appear a bit too Beatrix Potterish for me. Perhaps Moore will undertake Burnett's other works and give them an English feel. Recommended.

Suggestion for library use
This book would be good for students to use in a character study.  Students could be divided into groups, each taking one of the main characters.  The groups could then either discuss or create reports on their assigned character, discussing how the character evolved over the course of the story and providing an example of a similar character from another book.

Summary
"The Outsiders" tells the story of the struggles and clashes between two groups of teenagers in a small town.  Taking place in the 1960s, the story delves into issues that are still relevant today, such as class struggle, poverty, and violence.  The conflict between the two groups, (the Greasers and the Socs), is raw and heartbreaking, resulting in the death of some of the main characters.  It also unexpectedly brings together members from both groups, who are becoming increasingly frustrated by their daily lives.

Hinton, S. (1967). The outsiders,. New York: Viking Press. 

My impressions
I know that this is a wildly popular book, but it just was not my favorite.  I don't think that it was a bad book, and I can see it sparking some important conversations among young people, but I just didn't enjoy it.  I think that at the time it was written, the book was probably much more cutting edge, since it deals with topics that are at once taboo and representative of the realities that many teenagers live with.  However, having read many books and seen many movies that deal with these same issues, I found the book to be a little hokey and cliché.  The retro language probably added to this feeling, but the storyline was also fairly predictable.  However, I would still recommend this book to young readers, particularly if I felt that they could relate to its story.

Reviews

Peck, Dale. "'The Outsiders': 40 Years Later." The New York Times Book Review 23 Sept. 2007: 31(L). Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

Few books come steeped in an aura as rich as S. E. Hinton's novel ''The Outsiders,'' which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. At a time when the average young-adult novel was, in Hinton's characterization, ''Mary Jane went to the prom,'' ''The Outsiders'' shocked readers with its frank depictions of adolescents smoking, drinking and ''rumbling.'' Although other pop culture offerings had dealt with these themes -- most notably ''Rebel Without a Cause'' and ''West Side Story'' -- their intended audience was adult. By contrast, ''The Outsiders'' was a story ''for teenagers, about teenagers, written by a teenager.'' Hinton's candid, canny appraisal of the conflict between Socs, or Socials, and Greasers (for which one might substitute Jets and Sharks), published when she was 17, was an immediate hit and remains the best-selling young-adult novel of all time.

Long credited with changing the way Y.A. fiction is written, Hinton's novel changed the way teenagers read as well, empowering a generation to demand stories that reflected their realities. In fact, in the novel, the need for a representative literature is a central aspect of 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis's existential crisis. The book's famous statement of theme, ''Stay gold,'' is of course a reference to Robert Frost's ''Nothing Gold Can Stay,'' and then there's the not-quite-believable assertion that the novel was written as a ''theme'' for Ponyboy's English class: ''Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then and wouldn't be so quick to judge.'' Despite its obviousness, this device strikes me as crucial to the book, providing a context for the occasionally clunky deus ex machina and foreshadowing, not to mention the sometimes workmanlike prose. To an adolescent, the clunkers probably reinforce the authenticity of the book's voice, but the framing device establishes that unpolished authenticity as an aesthetic construction.

One suspects, however, that it was accidental here, or unconscious, just as it's likely that Hinton's echo of the testimonial frame Salinger used in ''The Catcher in the Rye'' (''If you really want to hear about it'') wasn't consciously intended, nor was Hinton's literalization of Holden's ''If a body catch a body coming through the rye'' into the rescue of a group of children from a burning church. In fact, what struck me most as an adult reader (and sometime Y.A. novelist) is the degree to which ''The Outsiders'' is derivative of the popular literature of its time, sometimes obliquely, as in the Salinger parallels, sometimes more directly. Hinton once said that ''the major influence on my writing has been my reading'' and names Shirley Jackson as one of her favorite writers. The literal truth of this statement is borne out in these two passages taken from the opening paragraphs of ''The Outsiders'' and of Jackson's ''We Have Always Lived in the Castle'' (1962).

First Jackson: ''I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.''

And now Hinton: ''I have light-brown, almost-red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have.''

Although such a strong resemblance between two works would probably be viewed with suspicion in this time of heightened alertness to plagiarism, this and other echoes strike me as crucial to the success of Hinton's novel. They soften the challenging nature of the book's subject matter by wrapping it in references, tropes and language familiar to its adolescent readers, even as they alleviate the fears of those readers' too-earnest parents. Right after the Jackson echo, for example, Ponyboy's older brother, Sodapop, is characterized as ''16-going-on-17.'' A quotation from ''The Sound of Music'' would seem out of place in a novel rife with ''blades'' and ''heaters'' and teenage pregnancy, but it's hard to deny after Ponyboy's immediate assertion that ''nobody in our gang digs movies and books the way I do.''

Indications of Ponyboy's, and Hinton's, love continue throughout. Randy Anderson's ''If his old man had just belted him -- just once, he might still be alive'' sounds a lot like James Dean's ''If he had the guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she'd be happy'' in ''Rebel Without a Cause,'' while the scene in which Dallas Winston waves around a gun until the cops shoot him is a cross between the climax of that movie, when Sal Mineo is gunned down for brandishing a weapon that (like Dally's) is unloaded, and Natalie Wood's famous ''How many bullets?'' speech from ''West Side Story.''

Going right down the honors English syllabus: Ponyboy and Johnny curl up together for warmth like Ishmael and Queequeg in ''Moby-Dick.'' Pony's admonition to himself --''Don't think'' -- is as Hemingway ''code hero'' as it comes. Johnny's half mechanical, half sublime parsing of Frost's ''Nothing Gold Can Stay'' is reminiscent of Mick Kelly's response to Beethoven's Fifth in ''The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.'' And of course Pony, witness to and chronicler of his friends' demise, could be the Midwestern cousin Nick Carraway left behind. If there's a reference to ''To Kill a Mockingbird,'' I can't find it, save perhaps in the Boo Radleyesque names (although Hinton has said that ''Peanuts the Pony'' was the first book she ever checked out of the library, so who knows). The text even presupposes judgments about appropriate reading material for a 14-year-old: ''I'd read everything in the house about 50 million times,'' Ponyboy informs us, ''even Darry's copy of 'The Carpetbaggers,' though he'd told me I wasn't old enough to read it. I thought so too after I finished it.''

The intertextual musings come to a head when Johnny tells Pony that Dallas reminds him of the Southern men in ''Gone With the Wind,'' which the two boys have been reading to combat boredom while they hide from the police. In Johnny's view, Dally's refusal to turn in his friend Two-Bit for vandalism is like the Confederate rebels' ''riding into sure death because they were gallant.'' Pony initially rejects this reading, but something about it nags him: ''Of all of us, Dally was the one I liked least. He didn't have Soda's understanding or dash, or Two-Bit's humor, or even Darry's superman qualities. But I realized that these three appealed to me because they were like the heroes in the novels I read. Dally was real. I liked my books and clouds and sunsets. Dally was so real he scared me.''

This is good stuff -- great stuff for a teenager. Dally's ''realness'' is made apparent by characters in a book; by contrast, the other members of the gang, who've limited themselves to playing roles they've picked up elsewhere, are suddenly seen as less real, enabling Pony to understand why, at the beginning of the novel, Cherry Valance shyly declared, ''I kind of admire him.'' What goes unsaid until the end of the story is that Pony, like Dally, needs a book to explain him, but is forced to write it himself.

In his introduction to ''Slow Learner,'' Thomas Pynchon remarks that the appropriate ''attitude toward death'' that characterizes serious fiction is usually absent in young-adult literature; but one feels ''The Outsiders'' would pass Pynchon's test. Dally is fearless, which Pony recognizes as heroic but also foolish. That Dally's death scene is a mesh of two of the most enduring moments in American cinema is beside the point. The question is not where the material comes from (''West Side Story'' is based on ''Romeo and Juliet,'' after all, and James Dean's antihero is a latter-day Bartleby or Raskolnikov) but what the writer does with it. The test comes when Ponyboy sums up the conflict between Socs and Greasers as ''too vast a problem to be just a personal thing.'' Salinger couldn't get away with that line, and neither could Pynchon, because their books are too idiosyncratic, too distinct. But Hinton, earnest teenager that she was, wrote to reveal the universality of her Greasers, just as Wright and Ellison did for African-Americans, or Paley and Roth did for Jews.

Each time I came across another borrowing, the success of her strategy was impressed upon me. And at the same time I was reminded of 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan, who was flayed last year for borrowing excessively from various sources for her own novel. If some high-minded, plagiarism-wary reader had persuaded S. E. Hinton to remove all references to the books and movies that inspired her, ''The Outsiders'' probably wouldn't have slipped past the internal (let alone official) censors that governed '60s adolescence. Forty years on, we may see the seams of its gilding, but the heart of Hinton's groundbreaking novel is still, indisputably, gold.

Solomon, Charles. "Review of The Outsiders." The Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 Aug. 1990): 10. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Sept. 2014.
Written when she was only 16, The Outsiders was S. E. Hinton's first novel. It set the pattern for her later works, which all focus on disaffected, underclass teen-agers in the Southwest. The hero of the story, Ponyboy Curtis, who conceals a poetic soul under a self-styled "greaser" exterior, finds himself drawn into a gang war that teaches him the difference between the right and wrong side of the tracks. The Outsiders is currently the basis of a show on Fox television and was made into a feature film by Francis Coppola; these adaptations should encourage teen-agers to read the work of this excellent juvenile novelist.

Suggestion for library use
"The Outsiders" would lend itself well to a group discussion on some of the issues depicted in the story, such as socioeconomic disparity and poverty.  Reluctant readers might see themselves in this book, sparking the possibility for good discussion and debate.