An unloved English girl named Mary Lennox is left orphaned by a cholera epidemic in colonial India and sent to live with an unknown uncle on the Yorkshire moors. The house is enormous and empty. The uncle is away. There are a hundred rooms, all locked. One day Mary finds a key half-buried in earth, and behind a wall she finds a garden no one has entered in ten years.
Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden in 1911. It is the story of the garden, but more than that it is the story of three sour, neglected children — Mary, her bedridden cousin Colin, and the moorland boy Dickon — who restore each other by restoring it. Across one English spring and summer, the garden comes back to life, and so do they.
Burnett wrote in clear, gentle English with patches of broad Yorkshire dialect for the local characters. Storica's A1 adaptation keeps the famous scenes (the locked door, the robin, Colin's first walk in the garden) and stays inside the most common five hundred words.
Burnett's English is one of the gentlest in nineteenth-century children's literature. Short scenes, concrete observation, almost no abstract vocabulary. The book lives inside a small physical world — a house, a moor, a walled garden — which gives an A1 reader the same vocabulary repeated until it actually sticks: door, key, wall, garden, robin, soil, spring.
Beginner. You can read short sentences in present tense, recognise the most common 500 words, and follow a simple plot. Past tense is just out of reach.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Secret Garden was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A1. Beginner. You can read short sentences in present tense, recognise the most common 500 words, and follow a simple plot. Past tense is just out of reach.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Yes — this is one of our books for early-stage learners. Sentences run short and the vocabulary stays inside the most common five hundred to one thousand words of your target language.
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