For the Holywood Reading Challenge 2019, I read a book called The Making of May.
The book is about a girl called Mary (but everyone calls her May) and her sister Louise and her brother Ben. Ben and Louise haven taken care of her nearly all of her life because her mother died when she was a baby and she never got to meet her real dad. Here is an important part to the story: May absolutely loves the secret garden movie.
May’s sister Louise has a boyfriend named Greg, and they both decide to go travelling from place to place for a year. May is very upset, so Ben decided that they would both make a fresh start as well.
Ben finds an advertisement for a gardening job in a newspaper, even though he doesn’t know anything about gardening, he applied anyway. The job came with the offer of a cottage where they could live. To get the job though, Ben has to have a reference (and Louise is their blind neighbours care-taker) so Louise has their neighbour, Miss Johnson, write a letter. Miss Johnson writes letters about Ben sometimes anyway, so Louise only had to change painter and decorator to gardener.
Ben gets the job and they settle into the cottage. May finds out there is a walled garden, and there was going to be a small garden competition, so she and the house owners (Mr Rutherford) son (Alex) work together in the garden. They end up winning in second place! Alex and May become really good friends while working in the garden. Alex has an older brother called Charlie who is an artist and working in Italy for the summer, but Alex also loves Art, so they take all of Charlies art supplies down to the garden and store them in the shed. May wanted to make the garden as much like the secret garden as possible, so the house keeper (Mrs Danielle’s) gets a lock smith to make a key for it so only May and Alex can access it.
May is curious as to why they are not allowed into the tower room. It is said that it is because of rotten floors, but why did she see a light in there, and Miss Danielle’s bringing down trays of food? May thinks she is keeping a mad relative up there. One night May and Alex go into the tower room to discover Mrs Danielle’s watching the television. May then falls through the floor, because of the rotten floors.
Louise and Greg were offered a job with a magazine company in Australia, so they stay with Greg’s uncle and aunty. Lou invites May and Ben to live there, and in the end, May goes to live in Australia for a year and Ben stays in England doing a History course in university and doing gardening in Thornton Hall sometimes at the weekends and in the holidays.
So there you have it! A (long) summery of the entire book! I loved this book and on a scale of 1-10, I would rate it a 7. I would recommend it to my friends. It was very hard to put down once you started reading it. I had to let my cat in this morning and couldn’t put it down to let him in XD
By Kaylan/
