A Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1905
Somewhere in my sobbingly sentimental heart there's a deeply buried yearning for works like this. Yeah, the story is contrived; dated; a little short in the action department; and not something I'd recommend to anyone who hadn't bawled her eyes out when Beth died. But it's got that certain timeless something. The secret in the attic. The games of let's pretend that lighten the day-to-day toil. The certain reward for true virtue.
All of the books in this chapter of Shelf Discovery are kids' books, and that, I believe, is the first fatal flaw in my whole "teen classic" project. The subtitle of the book was wrong--it should have been young adult classics, not teen classics--but I've already complained about that. It was my fault that I didn't catch what Lizzie Skurnick was saying in her reviews. A year ago when I first read Shelf Discovery, phrases like "eight-year-old brain" and "fourth grader" didn't register with me. They do now--now that I'm looking for them.
The second fatal flaw in my project is that the booklist is so very jumpy. It hops from a coming of age novel (Forever) to a young adult thriller of the seventies (Happy Endings Are All Alike) to a childrens' classic from 1905. Both books can live in my mind, but they can't coexist on my bookshelf.
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