THE SECRET GARDEN

This perdurable children’s classic has surely been read aloud 100,000 times by now, but never better than it is here by Carole Boyd. As you may remember, the Yorkshire accent of kind housemaid Martha and her brother, Dicken, becomes a synonym for natural simplicity, along with the beauty in the eponymous garden, which heals the two nearly ruined upper-class orphans, Mary and Colin. So the actor’s ear for the dialect is essential. I’d forgotten (since childhood) how sentimental and Victorian the embedded message is here, but it didn’t matter to this reader, and it won’t to any children with the luck to be hearing the story for the first time in this excellent version. B.G. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 03]