I wanted to love this but I actually ended up not being able to finish it. I'm only reviewing it on NetGalley for now and plan on reading a real copy to actually review. It seemed very interesting and cute but the way that certain letter combos were missing made it super difficult to read at times. It was not the best eARC format I've read, and really just wasn't able to really read it because it was more like a puzzle.

What a fun story! It took me a bit to get into the book as I'm not one who's big on the classics. However, I ended up flying through the last half of the book and it definitely made this story worth it. I have not read The Secret Garden or A Little Princess but I sincerely enjoyed this book. Following these three ambitious, wildly impulsive friends on their adventures was such a ride. I loved their personalities and how well they meshed together.

I really enjoyed the beauty described of Maythem Estates and the gardens. I would have loved to walk the moors and see all the beauty.

I thought that the execution of two authors writing together was done extremely well in this book. I couldn't tell you who wrote what parts because it flowed so well.

This was so much fun! I really enjoyed the writing of both writers. The book was so much fun! I highly recommend!

Unfortunately, this wasn't for me and I had to DNF part way through the book. This book just wasn't up my alley but I could see a younger person loving the book and its fun aspects.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. I absolutely loved the Secret Garden and The Little Princess growing up, and this book transported me right back to my 7 year old self. I absolutely loved the story that the author created when blending the two tales together, but I have to admit that it did miss a bit of a mark for me. I found myself pushing through certain chapters, then falling back in love, and then finding myself doing the same thing again. It was certainly a good read and I will suggest it to others that I love the nostalgia of the two stories, it just wasn’t something I would personally need to reread.

Thank you so much to Netgalley for this ARC! I really wanted to love this book, but something about the writing style and plot confused me. The writing was beautiful and made me think the author had an adult audience in mind,but the plot seemed very... meant for younger readers. Idk not m favorite

Reminding me of a mix of classics I liked as a kid, this story was an enjoyable blend.

Mary, Sara, and Cedric have known each other for a while. Mary’s father passed away and is stripped of his fortune so she’s left an orphan. The only relative is in America so she plans to leave, but that means leaving them behind. Sara and Cedric soon blossom into more than friends and Mary finds herself blossoming into a new relationship herself.

The relationships were sweet and full of promise. I loved the character development and finding yourself.

Fun, romantic mashup of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. I adored both those books in my childhood and this really brought back those great memories. Beautiful writing and a wonderful story made for a whimsical, entertaining read. *I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I had a difficult time reading this advanced reader copy due to many missing letters in this version. For example, the letters "fi" are missing in every location it should be, as well as "ff", etc. It made reading this copy to be a bit of a word puzzle.

I did enjoy what I could get through though. I liked the nostalgia for A Little Princess and A Secret Garden, as they were both books and movies I really enjoyed growing up. I like Sarah Crewes character update for this story too.

3.5/5 Stars

In this mashup of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, Cedric Errol, Mary Lennox, and Sara Crewe meet as students in boarding school and quickly become fast friends. When a tragedy strikes for Mary and Sara and they need to leave the school, the three friends make plans to run off to Paris. What follows is a wild adventure across England where they are confronted with the realities of the world around them and hard truths about each other. In the end, they must decide what paths they must each take to ensure their futures.

The greatest strength of this book is its trio of main characters. Sara, Cedric, and Mary are filled with personality and they complement each other so well. You can see how their pasts affect the people they are in the present, and that makes the story so much more real. The writing style was also beautiful, with excellent descriptions and dialogue that felt like the voice of the characters. I do wish the plot of this novel had more direction. It felt like some events in the story didn't really serve a purpose, and some decisions by characters were never really explained.

I think this book is best suited for a younger teen audience, as they may appreciate the hero's journey-style plot more. Thank you so much to Penguin Teen and Net Galley for providing me with an advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I went into this book with such high expectations because I love everything I’ve read so far by Melissa de la Cruz. Maybe co-writing is not the best strategy for her because I heard Jo & Laurie fell flat as well.

Let me start with the things I liked. I loved the mashup of two classics. I read The Secret Garden for the first time last year then I immediately read A Little Princess after finishing A Secret Princess. I liked the modern updates to the story, like the addition of more diverse characters and the difficult themes of racism addressed in the story. The original stories have some cringe moments and those were rectified in the retelling. I think A Secret Princess paid great homage to both original classics.

Unfortunately, This retelling did not live up to the magic and whimsy of the original two stories. I was mostly just bored the whole time I was reading it. It could be shortened 50-100 pages. The characters didn’t even make it to the mansion with the secret garden until almost 60% into the story. I finished this book almost a month ago, so it’s hard for me to remember the little details, but I do remember a scene with Sara in a retention home for criminal and homeless girls. I’m not sure what the point of this scene was? This is not a Dickens novel- there’s not a lot of need for this much detail and misery. I just wanted the story to move along to the secret garden. The synopsis also makes it sound like a romance novel, but that fell flat. I’m glad the ending avoiding Sara being saved by a man, but where was the romance?

Even though this book did not live up to my expectations, I would still purchase this book for family or friends who are fans of The Secret Garden or A Little Princess.

"Our natures became our fates."

Its always exciting when two authors you love come together for a novel creation. I'm a massive Secret Garden fan and could not resist a unique take on the classic. I feel like one of the few who has not read A Little Princess though. That's probably what made a lot of this novel new for me.

The three main characters, Sara, Mary and Cedric, were easy to adore. The way their personalities played off of each other was fun overall. One of my favorite aspects is that Sara is Filipino and Cedric has a disability that brings on seizures. The cultural and physical struggles these two endure were an enriching aspect to the story.

The father and son comnection, the friendships and sisterly bonds and the ending were a few of my favorite parts. I did feel the plot was choppy and filled with a a lot of extra filler that either dragged or rushed the story. I would've preferred a more mature nature to the two girls. The decisions they made just didn't seem to fit who they were written to be. There was a drop of unexpected magic/fantasy with the  genie and ghosts added in. I personally found myself more drawn to the cultural and historical aspects of that era. Lastly, out of the two romances, only one of them made sense too me. The other seemed forced into the writing.

If you're a fan of A Little Princess or The Secret Garden, this may be a young adult read your should add to your shelves. Thank you Penguin Teen for the gifted digital copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

A Secret Princess is basically a mashup of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. It follows Mary from the former book and Sara from the latter as they become best friends and dream of escaping their dreadful boarding school together. They also meet a boy named Cedric Erroll (and after more Googling I just discovered that he’s a character in another Frances Hodgeson Burnett book) and the three unlikely friends go through tragedy and laughter alike. I’m doing a poor job at explaining this but that’s because the Goodreads synopsis simultaneously SPOILS most of the book and gets one of the plot points wrong*. The description of the book on Goodreads has completely different romances from what I read in the book, but I think it’s mostly due to a slight name mix-up though.

I would recommend this only if you love Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s stories, or if you’re a younger reader who wants an okay retelling.

4.5 Stars

A Secret Princess is being billed as a mashup of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, but it actually draws from Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as well.

Reading this mashup was a mixture of cool and weird (which isn’t a bad thing).

It’s fun seeing these characters interact, and it truly feels as if Stohl and de la Cruz know their characters intimately. Each voice rings true, and actions and their actions are believable. The authors remained true to the source material while adeptly exploring their own story.

The weird comes when the storytellers diverge from the known path. They begin by taking you down a well-traveled trail, and just when you prepare yourself for a gentle curve, they take you off the route completely. While these changes are absolutely necessary, and well done, they often made me pause and wonder what made them decide to change “this” or “that.” These little pauses don’t ruin the flow, but do allow for some reflection.

The text throughout is smooth and inviting, which is a bonus because there are times when two authors work together, and you can tell who wrote what. That’s not the case here. Stohl and de la Cruz’s prose blends perfectly, making you forget that A Secret Princess is not the work of a lone writer.

If you’ve never read any of Burnett’s books (or watched the movies created from said books), A Secret Princess will be an enjoyable read. But it’s way more fun if you know the source material so you can celebrate the twists.

Reviews Posted
Goodreads
Storygraph
June 22, 2022

The first half of this book just was not it for me. Whereas I absolutely adored the second half. But I don’t think the second half was good enough to make up for what the first half was lacking.

I just felt that it took so long for this book to get started. In every chapter, I was waiting and waiting for things to pick up and for the relationships to better develop. The friendships felt very disconnected up until the hard way point. And the romance felt a little forced at the start, luckily, I ended up really liking it. I also thought the writing in the first half was choppy, and it often pulled me out o the story.

For some reason, everything was SO MUCH better. The friendships started to feel more real and not like a group of random people thrown together. And the setting started to pull me in. This sense of wonder and hope created a magical setting that I couldn’t get enough of.

There really isn’t much plot in this book because the focus is supposed to be on the characters. But I think the book could have benefited from more of a structure instead of solely relying on the dynamics of the friend group.

Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, and Cedric Errol meet at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary in a mashup of A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Stories are altered and combined, as needed to accommodate the entwinement. Sara is from the Philippines, not India, and her mother is Filipino, ergo Sara is brown skinned, which makes her even less popular at school. She does retain her brilliance, kindness, and general perfection. Mary, still contrary is no better liked by Miss Minchin, but just like her Secret Garden persona, doesn't give a fuck. Cedric is the most changed. He is a good, kind, sweetheart, but his body is that of Colin Craven, rather than that of the Fauntleroy in the eponymous tale.

It's a clever concept, but in practice is a little tedious.

I grew up watching and loving the animation for A Little Princess, so when I saw this especially after seeing that a Filipino author co-wrote this, with Sara being Filipino, I was really excited. I read A Little Princess before reading this and I was planning on reading The Secret Garden as well but when I heard and saw the very problematic things about it, I decided not to. I just read summaries online. For this book in particular, I really enjoyed witnessing the MCs' friends grow and their relationships with each other develop. But the second half/last third and end I did not like. The ending felt so disjointed to the first part of the book. It didn't feel like a reflection of the friendships that they had.

Going into this book I was excited about the prospect of a secret garden and little princess retelling that also had bits of YA flair. However for me personally I found this book to drag along. Halfway through the book there really wasn’t a lot of draw to continue to push through as nothing very largely of note in the plot had occurred. Yes two out of the three characters were now orphans (or so we think at this point) and they’d escaped their boarding school to look for adventure but aside from small details nothing really happened and the characters seemed rather two dimensional to me. The pacing of the book was also rather off. Especially the ending which felt so rushed compared to the beginning which was dragged out.
With that being said the descriptive writing style was quite beautiful and poetically brought to life the different settings in which the book took place. It definitely had a classic novel aesthetic to the style it was written in as well. I did really like the epilogue and how it tied everything in place!

Secret garden and the little princess COMBINED?! Yes yes a thousand times yes! The perfect combo and nostalgia for me! Also loved the romance as well

Thank you for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.all opinions are reflective of my own views.
Solid retelling of a classic tale … plus it mixes the secret garden and a little princess absolutely love it. Ending is a b but overall good plot and characters.