👑A Secret Princess, by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz👑
A Secret Princess, by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz
My main criticism of this book is that the writers tried to do way too much. Three of Frances Hodgson Burnett's books mashed up into an alternate universe: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy. I feel like a mashup with THREE of FHB's worlds was overly ambitious. The story kind of became choppy. Because of course with each world comes different secondary characters (Miss Minchin, Becky, Lavinia, Jessie, Ram Dass in A Little Princess for example), and multiple that by THREE and it just becomes too much to keep up with.
Something else that irked me about this book is that the writers change the canon created by FHB. Okay, making Sara Crewe a person of colour (half Phillipino and half Indian) for the sake of progressiveness is fine. But why change the way her parents die? And even though FGH says that Becky is stunted from malnutrition, why make her actually deformed with phossy jaw and give us a backstory of her entire family dying of cholera and typhoid? Like wtf, wasn't that poor girl's life depressing enough? I just feel like they overdid it by a lot. I do have a tag for the book though, because because I've been making graphic compilation posts with quotes. (One of them is queued for next year).
This book made me think of this modern sequel to ALP where Lottie becomes a Suffragette. Except the writers of this book went even further. I really feel like writing my own ALP fanfiction. I wouldn't really care about seeing it published, I would just love to extend FGH's Sara Crewe through writing in a way that is genuine and authentic for the character, while honouring the source material. There is a lot of sadness as it is in ALP. The authors of this book really didn't need to make the protoganists more miserable. I do want to trigger warn - there is a child death in this book, not one of the main characters, but it is still really sad.