A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett || A Book and Feelings Review

When one of my quiet students asked me to read one of her favorite books, how could I say no? I borrowed the book and started it right on the first day of the new year and it was a weird experience.

The fact that she let me annotate in her book made me so freaking happy that, I just annotated with the utmost care and love. After all humans who share books are on a different level of superbly amazing! This blog post might seem a little rusty because I’ve written a post after one whole year, so ignore the mess and thank you.

Classics are one genre of books that I read only when someone makes me read them and I don’t like the slow paced way classics usually have but this book was actually intriguing. The start was different, a story of a child told by our author, making the child seemed too grown up for her age was the highlight.

The thing that kept me reading this book was, the amount of things that I could connect with in the story. Things like how our lead Sara, was forced to leave her only family, her father to go to a select seminary for young ladies, it reminded me of the movie ‘Enola Holmes’ and kept me wondering where the author would take this story to. This book reminded me of a lot of movies both good and bad and had me reading it non-stop even after my eyes were burning and my teacher school work was piling up.

Firstly the whole book had the saddest vibe ever, the depressing parts in the book were so numerous that after a point I just gave up hope on having a good or even happy ending. The amount of suffering this tiny kid has to endure is just too much, this kid never lived her life as a kid, the life of being strong emotionally is a lonely one and this book portrays this very well.

The book connected well with me because it was as weird and curious as The Hatter from Alice In Wonderland. The way Sara read books, the way she saw life, the way she made friends, the way she obsessed over her doll, the way she resigned herself to situations without fighting back made me want to go into the book and fight for her instead but I kept remembering that she was a kid anyway and we as kids would have done too many stupid things ourselves.

The adults portrayed in this book are on two extremes, either they are horribly rotten, not fit to be parents or a very humble human being and the rotten ones were quiet high in number. I absolutely detested the warden of the home that Sara was put into and almost every other adult in this godforsaken novel.

The very curious thing was Sara’s capability to make up stories and God’s above, how well I made up stories and even now make them up. I connected the most with this character based on this quality of hers, where she made up so many stories to live through life that was pushing her down every time she tried living her life like a princess.

The most queer thing was how this little girl made friends in the most desperate situations, mice? rats? sparrows? She made friends with everyone and everything that lent her even a scrap of attention, this was heartbreaking yet super different for a little child, more like a Cinderella story. Sara was a giver and she was one of the best, a princess indeed. She needed to cry and shout more though.

When situations got very bad like from almost half of the book, I had this incredible urge to go into the book and just help her out. Sara did have her own people though and that was a relief amongst all the angst that was going around in the book. The longing that she had for a family when she didn’t have one was super sad. I just felt so heartbroken while reading her longing for a family, it actually squished my heart.

The mention of Indian history though very little made me miss reading history a lot, a few words, a few memories and a few instances made me nostalgic. The power of good thoughts was something that was repeatedly highlighted in the book, the lead, Sara did stay on the good thoughts path but trying times made her lose her way quiet a few times. The intensity of each sad part in the book hit me very hard because I just hate it when kids are going through a hard time with very little people who actually care about them.

Right from being treated worse than a slave to starving the kid, this portrayal of a kid who is struggling in life was a sad sad extremely sad and introspective tale.

The silver lining was how Sara found her own magic friend who gave her comfort in the most dire circumstances. Good food and good sleep are the best and this was given the most importance and relevance.

On the whole, this book was very well written and I annotated the book after taking permission from my student ❤ This is probably the shortest blog post I’ve written, I can’t believe that I read a classic as the first book of this year 2024, also I can’t believe that this is my first blog post after one whole year of a blog slump! Here’s to many more!

Thanks for reading!