Anne of the Island

I finished re-listening to this while I was on a cruise visiting Prince Edward Island, timed that way on purpose of course. I learned while there that Avonlea was based on Cavendish, where LM Montgomery lived almost her whole life, and saw the house (belonging to Montgomery’s cousins) that inspired Green Gables. There was even a Lover’s Lane and a Haunted Wood adjacent to the property! (We didn’t have anywhere near long enough to explore it as it was a tour, but what a treat to see it!)

I can’t necessarily say this is my favorite of the Anne series, as it’s really very much a continuation of the first two–very episodic. But Anne is grown up in this one as in the last, all of her childhood foibles already behind her, and she’s rather perfect in every way except one: she’s completely blind to how she feels about Gilbert. That makes for the most sustained conflict in the whole series, and it features more prominently in this book than any of the others, even though it was in the first two books to some extent as well.

I’d forgotten how the films were a mish-mash of the first several books in the series. Much of the rest of the substance (except for the part about Gilbert) from this book doesn’t appear in the films at all, and there are a lot of characters from this book that never do either. But that meant I felt like I was almost reading it for the first time. Almost.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: none

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