Mandy
by Julie Andrews Edwards
Hi! My teacher recommended that I read this book because it was her favorite book when she was little. Are there any books that you have loved that were recommended to you by someone else? This book is about a girl named Mandy who lives in an orphanage. She misses her family and wants a family to call her own.
Mandy discovers a secret cottage. She tends to it every day, even though it is off of the orphanage’s campus and secret. One day, she gets very sick with pneumonia. She still ventures out to tend to her cottage, though. However, she is not feeling as well as she thought she would and faints in the doorway of the cottage. The family who lives on the property that the cottage is on finds her and takes care of her. They grow very close and become the family figure that Mandy never had. However, at Christmas, Mandy has to leave them. She misses them so much that she’s even thinking about running away!
In the book, while Mandy was at the family’s house, she was working to discover secret passageways. However, they never told what the last secret passageway was that they were looking for. I wish that the author had revealed that to the reader.
I liked how Mandy was able to take care of her own little cottage and make it her own place. It would be pretty cool to have your own private area that no one new about – that was all yours!
This book did not remind me of any other book that I’ve ever read. You may think, “Well, it’s a book about an orphanage. Aren’t there a lot of books about orphanages?” Most books are about bad orphanages, but in this one, Mandy was treated pretty well! The fact that Mandy was not treated horribly is the unique factor in this book.
Will Mandy get back to her “family” or will she remain at the orphanage forever? As I always say, read the book to find out!
A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:
“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor – zero being not scary at all and five being majorly scary): 2
“Yucky-Lovey Stuff” (how I describe the romance factor – zero having no yucky-lovey parts in it and five having major yucky-lovey parts): 3
I give this book 5 wands.
This book was an amazing story! There were good times, bad times, and everything in between. This gives you a good perspective of how good life is for us. It’s sometimes easy to forget how hard life can be for people not as lucky as we are.
Fun Fact: The author of this book is the actress who starred in the original Mary Poppins and in The Sound of Music!