THIS BOOK IS AMAZING!
I am hesitant to review this book–not because I don’t have an exact opinion about it, but because I love it so much that, no doubt if I don’t check myself, I’d have written a 10-page review filled with nothing but exclamation points and declarations of love. I discovered this novel because I have fallin in love with its cartoon adaptation - here in the Philippines it is called as “Cedie, Ang Munting Prinsipe”, also it has a film adaptation with the same title. So this year I grab the opportunity to read the novel of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Little Lord Fauntleroy, a children’s literature.
Mrs. Errol, Dick, Mr. Hobbs, Mr. Havisham, Earl of Dorincourt, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Words cannot fully express how much I loved these characters. One might argue that they're horribly unbelievable, most especially in the case of the character whose name the title bears; but, in any case, I think Burnett did a really good job in showing the evolution of the Earl of Dorincourt. There’s even something near the finish that shows that the Earl of Dorincourt, while certainly being more agreeable, wasn't wholly good in the end and that just struck me as a well-done move by the author.
In the end, this is a children’s story and it should impart a good moral, otherwise it wouldn’t be a children’s story. It’s very clear in it’s point: be good to everyone, stay humble and you’ll have good fortune brought to you. It’s very simplistic–the ‘be good to everyone’ message is done to death–but it’s good all the same. Sentimentality, evidently it is a story that can interest a child, but still moralising throughout – it’s not as overt as some books for children, but it’s there. “Literature should improve your mind” kinda thinking.
The novel is just so beautiful and flows so well and it just compulsively makes you read on and on and on. It’s so simple, but it’s very elegant in its simplicity. If not for the style of prose that the author employs in here, no doubt I’d have found the characters unbelievable and ended it before I ever even started in the first place.
“But only be good, dear, only be brave, only be kind and true always, and then you will never hurt any one, so long as you live, and you may help many, and the big world may be better because my little child was born. And that is best of all, Ceddie, — it is better than everything else, that the world should be a little better because a man has lived — even ever so little better, dearest.”
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars









