the humming room a novel inspired by the secret garden

And finally, there is the secret passage that leads Roo to an indoor tropical rain forest that has been hidden from the world.Īs Roo and the Faigne (actually a flesh-and-blood boy named Jack) work to bring this dead garden back to life, life creeps back into Roo as well. Then there is the mystery of the West Wing, where Roo is not allowed to go, and the humming sound which sometimes sounds like screaming and crying, though no one is meant to live there. There is the mystery about the beautiful wild boy whom the locals call the Faigne, who paddles alone among the rocks and isles, making friends with the wildlife and living without adult supervision. And yet the island stirs a new life in this closed-up, hurt girl.Ĭhiefly, what brings Roo back to life is the mystery, or rather the mysteries, of Cough Rock.

Whether this is finally to be her home, however, will depend on how well she can adapt to a gloomy old house that used to be a sanitarium for children dying of tuberculosis, on an island in the Saint Lawrence River accessible only by boat, among servants who worry more about keeping the girl out of her uncle’s way than about how she is doing. At last, she comes in for a landing at the remote home of her uncle-a reclusive man who was estranged from her father, his brother. Before we have time to find out what made her this way, we see her taken from the scene of her drug-dealer father’s murder (which she witnessed) and passed along to a series of foster families, where she is even less loved and cared for than before. Roo Fanshaw is a runty thief, good at hiding with her hoard of trinkets in tight spaces where big people can’t come after her.

The humming room a novel inspired by the secret garden