A 1908 Book that Never Gets Old – Anne of Green Gables

ON OUR BOOKSHELVES

NOVEL: Anne of Green Gables

AUTHOR: L.M. Montgomery

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1908

REVIEW:

Anne of Green Gables is commonly considered a novel for children, perhaps because it is chiefly about a child, one Anne Shirley, an 11-year old orphan.  She is mistakenly sent to live with the middle-aged Cuthberts, a brother and sister who had sought to adopt a boy to help them on their farm in Prince Edwards Island, Canada. When the error is realized, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert decide to keep her anyway, and the story tells of Anne’s life with them, at school, with her friends, and in the (fictional) town of Avonlea.

It’s not a particularly dramatic plot, but Anne thrives (after a rather deprived childhood spent in orphanages and as an unpaid servant in the homes of strangers); she’s a dramatic, romantic, and extremely talkative girl who has various mishaps (being blamed for losing an amethyst brooch and making a false confession; accidentally getting her best friend drunk on wine, which she’d thought was a non-alcoholic cordial; dyeing her red hair green by mistake, and so forth) as she grows into a young woman. She’s sixteen at the end of it, intelligent, kind, joyful, loyal, and hard-working.

Beloved by children, to be sure, Anne of Green Gables is a delight, even for adult readers. There’s a whole series of sequels focusing on Anne as she grows older, and then on her children, and they’re perfectly fine books, and an interesting historical look at Canadian life through the late 19th and early 20th centuries (including the WWI home front). None of them, however, manage to recapture the utter charm of the original. Try it. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised at just how enjoyable Anne’s coming of age is.

RATING (one to five whistles, with five being the best): 4 Whistles

***

HOW TO PURCHASE: Amazon

***

Lead-In Image Courtesy of Verena Matthew / Shutterstock.com

***

Laura LaVelle is an attorney and writer who lives in Connecticut, in a not quite 100-year-old house, along with her husband, two daughters, and a cockatiel.

Laura can be contacted at laura@newswhistle.com

***

ALSO ON OUR BOOKSHELVES:

A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson

A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler

A Room With a View, E.M. Forster

An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon

Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan

Bunker Hill, Nathan Philbrick

Burmese Days, George Orwell

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast

Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Cloudstreet, Tim Winton

Cockpit Confidential, Patrick Smith

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

Doctor Jazz, Hayden Carruth

Ed Emberly’s Drawing Book of Animals, Ed Emberly

Endangered Pleasures, Barbara Holland

Envious Casca, Georgette Heyer

Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

Good Poems, Garrison Keillor

Gowanus Waters, Steven Hirsch

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, & Jack Thorne

Heads in Beds, Jacob Tomsky

Here is New York, E.B. White

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, Laurie Colwin

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

Lexicon, Max Barry

Longbourn, Jo Baker

Madeleine’s Ghost, Robert Girardi

Malice Aforethought, Frances Iles

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Notorious RBG, Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

One Summer: America 1927, Bill Bryson

Out of the Blackout, Robert Bernard

Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley

Plotted: A Literary Atlas, Andrew DeGraff

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle…and Other Modern Verse, Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Rose Madder, Stephen King

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rivelli

Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Ed., Lewis Carroll & Martin Gardner (with original illustrations by John Tenniel)

The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith

The Dancer of Izu, Kawabata Yasunari

The House Without a Key, Earl Derr Biggers

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Oliver Sacks

The Martian, Andy Weir

The Modern Kids, Jona Frank

The Monogram Murders, Sophie Hannah

The Mother & Child Project, Hope Through Healing Hands (ed.)

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer

The Translator, Nina Schuyler

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce

The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, Saki

The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

The Women in Black, Madeleine St John

They Call Me Naughty Lola, David Rose

What If?, Randall Munroe

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

Up At the Villa, W. Somerset Maugham

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff

— # —