Hello and welcome to the Storytime for grown-ups' Christmas Spectacular.

I'm Faith Moore, and for the months of November and December, we'll be reading A Little

Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett.

Each episode, I'll read one chapter from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations, so it's easier to follow along.

It's like an audiobook with built-in notes.

So gather your family together, brew a pot of tea, or a mug of hot chocolate, find a cozy chair, and settle in.

It's story time.

Music a cozy chair and settled in. It's story time. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Oh, that last chapter. It's so heart-wre heartbreaking, isn't it? You know, I was realizing,

I was thinking about this before, and I was realizing that in every book that we've done,

there is one chapter that I'm kind of always waiting to get to, this one chapter where I feel

like suddenly the book kind of like locks in. Like you sort of realize like,

oh, that's what book we're in. Oh, that's what's going on. I mean, I'm not going to spoil it if you

haven't listened to all of the books that we've read so far. But if you have, just think about it.

Like, which one was it in Jane Eyre? Okay. Yes. Which one was it in Woman and White? Yes. Which one was it in Frankenstein? Yes, right? There's something, pride and prejudice. There's a chapter in each book, at least each of the books we've done so far, that I feel a kind of sense of excitement. I mean, I know this was a really horrible chapter in the sense

that horrible things happened to Sarah, and we're going to talk about that. But I'm also kind of just

excited because it's in this chapter, it's in this moment, that we kind of suddenly go, oh,

okay, this is the book that we're in. This is what is going on here. And so we're here. We've made it to

this chapter. We are about halfway through almost, a little less than halfway, I think, but just

about halfway through. And we're almost into the Christmas season. And I think pretty soon I'm

going to start talking about why I think this

book is a Christmas book, even though it doesn't take place at Christmas. It's not about Christmas.

And we're sort of getting there. But this is the moment, I think, where we figure out that this is not

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