Anne de Green Gables

I got so much more than I expected! But it might have helped that (mostly) I expected saccharin and that's pretty much it. Anne avoided two irksome lit traps that I was ready to jump on.

First, there's the main character that everyone loves and by whom everyone is amazed, the author hoping to convince the reader to love this character because all of these surrogates do. I was convinced that Montgomery was going to try this tack early, as I found Anne more bothersome than winning, despite the initial reaction of the secondary characters. She avoids this first trap, I think, because of the successful navigation of the second.

The second being, the main character is really only a two-dimensional foil challenging all other characters to evolve to suit. For example, every Shirley Temple film. Yes, the presence of Anne in the lives of the Avonlea characters is transformative. But Anne is changeable, as well, and grows without becoming stale or cynical. I don't particularly care how the secondary characters evolve in a story - that's why they're secondary. If the events of a story aren't enough to cause development in a protagonist, why bother recounting the events? Montgomery handles this growth beautifully.

Lastly, though most of the description comes from a child character with an overactive imagination, I love how Prince Edward Island is presented here. Really lovely setting.

Please don't say I have to read more of these. Series fiction is so blurgh.

I never read this as a kid -- kind of odd because it forms a natural class with Little Women, The Secret Garden, A Girl of the Limberlost, and the Little House books, all of which I read over and over.

Very briefly: what a charming book. I'm so sad it took me this long to get to it.

A jumble of observations:

1. I like Anne. Out there in the wilds of the internet she often gets called a Mary Sue, but it's not clear to me that she actually is. She has many qualities we value today -- imaginative, creative, friendly, outgoing, generous, kind, readerly, independent, intelligent, outdoorsy, slender (no matter how you feel about it, our culture does value thinness) -- but how many of those qualities were valued in children in 1900? I don't know enough about the sociocultural norms of the period to say. I will admit it is (unusual? unexpected? unlikely) that the girl who arrives at Green Gables -- after a life of shuttling between orphanages and foster homes including one where she was responsible for 3 sets of twins -- is as happy and perky as Anne is. Nevertheless I was charmed by her excitability and her over-the-top dialogue (everything is a "thrill" or "romantic" or puts her in the "depths of despair"). The truth is a lot of kids behave as if everything is life or death because they just don't know better yet, and it's funny.

2. As much as I like Anne, I'm not sure this is actually a story about Anne. While she is the star player, we don't get inside her head much (beyond what she says, which, granted, is a lot). Along with Marilla and the rest of Avonlea, we are set back from Anne, watching her because she's a curiosity. Anne does change a little -- over 5 years she gets less chatty and less ambitious (or at least, her ambitions become more realistic) -- but we aren't privy to the inner workings that get Anne from Point A to Point B, and at least some of these changes can be attributed to maturity that comes with age. Whereas we do have access to what goes on in Marilla's head and we get to experience Marilla's personal growth. Anne is such a big personality that her presence changes the town and especially Matthew and Marilla.

3. The book is very episodic - there's little connection between one event and another, which feels odd from a modern perspective where we expect a Big Plot. This was addressed in the CBC TV movie version from the 80s, which takes the same events from the book and arranges them such that we have more a sense of causation and connection between events.

4. One of the things I found interesting was the difference in my response to different aspects of the time period. For me, technological differences are easy to adapt to (horse and buggies? sure, perfectly normal); sociocultural differences are more jarring. For example, a teacher openly woos a student (NO. Just no.) and characters' political affiliations are discussed even though it doesn't matter for the story. Imagine how strange it would be if JK Rowling stated outright that the Dursleys are Tories and therefore Harry Potter prefers Labour, or vice versa.

5. The book is set in a community and time in which church is a central force; there's a lot of talk about youth groups and tea parties with the minister's wife and prayer. Although the book isn't "religious" per se, it's impossible to ignore that it reflects a particular set of cultural values that, as a non-religious person, don't apply to me. It's slightly strange to be intentionally interacting with cultural values that I avoid. I didn't feel uncomfortable while reading this, perhaps because it's a historical artifact, but if my (hypothetical) children were to read this, we'd have a conversation about religion and prayer.