Miss Potter

Filed under: Books — purplehsiaoling at 8:09 am on Friday, March 16, 2007

     "A girl Potter?"  That’s my first thought when I saw the book at the Children’s section in MPH MidValley.  Haha..  Yeah, I do browse through children’s books and reminisce about the books I used to read when I was a kid.  Heck, when I have time to kill in the bookstore, I’d grab an Enid Blyton book and start reading.

     I digress.  Miss Potter is not in anyway linked to Harry Potter but is instead a novel on Beatrix Potter, the creator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit.  Renee Zellweger’s face is on the cover and charmed by her twinkly blue eyes and rosy pink cheeks, I bought the book.  Apparently, there’s a Miss Potter movie but I doubt that it’d hit Malaysian shores.  Anyone seen the movie?

     When I began reading the book, I fell instantly in love with its opening line and to avoid doing any injustice to it, I’ll just repeat it verbatim here.  "It is a Wonder, really - one of the great Wonders, as William Heelis used to say - how the course of a person’s life can be altered, utterly and completely, by a moment so innocent one may not even notice that it has happened."

     Lovely, don’t you think?  And I do agree whole-heartedly with it.  I think most of our lives are changed every minute, every second of the day by inconspicuous events rather than pivotal ones.  If you ponder for a while, wouldn’t you start to wonder, now if I haven’t done this or walked there or said that, what would have happened?  Yes, what would have happened indeed.

     I have yet to read The Tale of Peter Rabbit (I certainly will one day soon!) but I have seen the books on display and with my aversion to pictorial books, I guess that’s why I gave them a miss.  Nevertheless, Miss Potter is a delightful read despite how the story went.

     Beatrix Potter is someone with whom I can jolly well identify and would love to be acquainted.  She is independent, refuses to conform to parental and societal pressures and spunky.  Most interesting of all, she has a world of imagination!  She follows her dreams.  And that is how she becomes a world famous author.

      Sadly, however, in the end, pretending no longer makes her happy.  She finds love but Death takes him away.  Norman Warne makes her life feel real after all the years of pretending and after he is gone, she loses the passion for what used to make her happy in the past.

     ” ‘You mean,’ said Beatrix, ‘what if God offered me a choice: Beatrix, you can go back in time, you will not meet Norman, you will not find love - but, you will never feel this loneliness and pain.  Oh Millie, I would choose the loneliness!  I would choose the pain!’ "  (Millie is Norman’s sister)

     Is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved before?  *Ponder, ponder*  Maybe to love really means to have courage.