By Frances Hodgson Burnett
A sour, orphaned girl is sent to a grim house on the Yorkshire moors, digs up a garden that's been locked away for ten years, and finds a hidden cousin who's been told he'll never walk.
Mary Lennox is hard to like, and Burnett means her to be: spoiled, sour, sickly, used to being waited on hand and foot. When cholera sweeps through her home in India and kills her parents, she's found alone in the empty house and shipped off to a huge, sad manor on the Yorkshire moors, where nobody much wants her either. With nothing to do, she starts poking around, and hears about a walled garden that's been locked and left to grow wild for ten years, since her aunt died there. Mary finds the buried key, then the hidden door, and starts to dig. She also turns up Colin: a cousin nobody mentions, a boy shut in a dark room and told all his life that he's going to die young. Two prickly, forgotten children and one sleeping garden slowly bring each other back to life.
This is a real, unhurried novel, and it asks a little patience up front. The prose is dense and Edwardian, and the story takes its time. If your child is ready for that and doesn't need to adore the heroine on page one, it's a keepsake. Mary starts out genuinely disagreeable, and watching her thaw through dirt and fresh air and the plain work of bringing a garden back is the whole pleasure of it. A well-illustrated hardcover, with the garden painted in full color as it wakes up, is a lovely thing to own and pass down. I'd flag the pace honestly: it's a slow-burn, atmospheric book, best for a patient reader on their own or a family reading it aloud together over a few weeks.