The Humming Room by Ellen Potter

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Hiding is Roo Fanshaw's special skill. Living in a frighteningly unstable family, she often needs to disappear at a moment's notice. When her parents are murdered, it's her special hiding place under the trailer that saves her life.

As it turns out, Roo, much to her surprise, has a wealthy if eccentric uncle, who has agreed to take her into his home on Cough Rock Island. Once a tuberculosis sanitarium for children of the rich, the strange house is teeming with ghost stories and secrets. Roo doesn't believe in ghosts or fairy stories, but what are those eerie noises she keeps hearing? And who is that strange wild boy who lives on the river? People are lying to her, and Roo becomes determined to find the truth.

Despite the best efforts of her uncle's assistants, Roo discovers the house's hidden room--a garden with a tragic secret.

Inspired by The Secret Garden, this tale full of unusual characters and mysterious secrets is a story that only Ellen Potter could write. 

The Humming Room by Ellen Potter  is a fantastic, modern retelling of The Secret Garden. In fact, other than the names and the setting, The Humming Room closely follows the beloved original. So why read The Humming Room, you say, instead of just re-reading The Secret Garden?

I give you – Roo. Distrustful and tough, wild and willful, Roo endeared herself to me from the first page. Something about Potter’s sharp and unsentimental description of the flatness of her green eyes, were they should be alive and brilliant but are spiritless instead --- won me.

Roo has learned how to hide from the harshness of the world. She has no friends and refuses to talk to anyone, even if well-meaning. Easy enough if you're quiet and small and your charming but criminal father and his trailer trash girlfriend have no parenting instincts. But even Roo can't hide from the social worker who comes to get her after they're murdered. From hiding in a garden of pilfered, artificial flowers she created as a sanctuary below her family’s trailer, Roo is taken by the social worker to remote Cough Island to be raised by a rich, mysterious uncle she never before knew existed.

"All around her on the icy, packed earth were dozens of tiny flowers, some made of blown glass, some trapped in Lucite domes-daisies, tiger lilies, a bouquet of pink roses, paper-thin red poppies. There was a pair of enamel earrings shaped like marigolds, large and gaudy, which she had stolen from the drugstore. She had mounded up earth and planted them by sticking their posts through the ground. Roo considered the little garden before nudging the poppies closer to the marigolds and putting the snake between them. Then she flung herself to the ground and listened to the earth. It was something she often did, checking the ground the way other girls might check the mirror. She could hear all its movements, small, fluttering sounds of life that fascinated her."

There’s a quiet beauty to Potter’s writing which reflects Roo’s personality – ever watchful and observant. Roo is sensitive to everything around her, even if it’s not immediately apparent to anyone else. She can find an all but dead garden that’s been walled up on the island; she can hear life humming in a seemingly lifeless earth. Cough Island just wild and stimulating enough that it awakens Roo’s adventurous spirit. In doggedly resuscitating the secret garden and making unlikely friendships, Roo blossoms as well, coming to life when she stops hiding herself from the world and becomes part of it.

The message in The Humming Room is exquisitely conveyed:  Like the secret garden, Roo and other characters in may have walled off their emotions because of painful tragedy, but there’s always a chance for redemption and renewal. 

Thank you very much to the Amazon Vine Program and Feiwel & Friends for providing copies for me to review!