Think of a ruder Alice in a saner (if sadder) Wonderland, and you've got contrary Mary Lennox, the orphaned heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 classic, newly reissued as The Annotated Secret Garden (Norton). No bored, churlish child (or adult) could possibly resist the healing powers of a windswept moor, a walled-up paradise, a joyful, nurturing boy whose Yorkshire dialect is as luscious as muffins, and a robin with a shrewdly discerning heart.

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