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The main character in this book is Mary Lennox, a girl who survived cholera while living in India with her parents, by hiding herself in the nursery where she was forgotten by everyone. Being an orphan, she was sent to live with her uncle. Mary Lennox is presented as an unwanted an unloved child who doesn't love anybody except herself, but in literature an ugly soul usually matches an ugly body, so:
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everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another
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When she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, frateful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and other native servants , and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived
Mary's uncle is living in a 'great, big, desolate old house in the country', and he's so cross that he would let no one to go near him. Mary is constantly compared in beauty and manners with her beautiful mother, and she is considered unattractive and plain, the children even call her 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary' . Mary is the total opposite of Pollyanna, she had all material things a child would dream of, but she didn't had love from her parents, she also was considered a disagreeable child.
Staying her uncle's house, Mary becomes very curious of one of the gardens that was locked for more than ten years, there were also several rooms in the house where she was not allowed to enter (like an interdiction in an classical fairy tale). Breaking the rules, Mary finds the key from the garden door, and entering the forbidden rooms she finds that there lived her cousin, a hypochondriac boy with a very bad temper, kept hidden because his father believed he would not survive his illness, and he didn't give him attention because his wife had died giving birth to him. Mary and her cousin Collin cured together of the bad temper, because they had no idea how annoying they were until they met somebody just like them. We find a lot of physical appearance descriptions in Mary's struggle to gain weight because she was constantly told that she is too skinny.
This book is also about parenting, and shows how bad can it be for children to not feel loved, and shows in a non-judgmental manner that parents have a big responsibility when raising their children.
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th' worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way- or always to have it
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