Anne of Green Gables Challenge

My sisters and I are readers. More importantly, we’re students of fiction. We love to spend hours discussing why our favourite stories work and what makes them stand out from all the other stories we’ve read. I actually consider these conversations one of the greatest assets to my own writing.

Last night, two of us were talking about the beloved Canadian classic, Anne of Green Gables, and what makes it better than so many other stories with a basically similar storyline. The answer—it has...