Anne of Green Gables (series)

by Lucy Maud Montgomery (Duke Classics 2012; originally published 1908)

#1 – Vicki and I have been watching Anne With an E, a miniseries based on the Anne of Green Gables series. As usual, there are scenes I totally don’t remember; so I felt inspired to reread the book to see if they actually happened. (Some did; but some were apparently made up out of whole cloth, like Anne, accused of stealing Marilla’s amethyst brooch, being sent back to the orphan asylum, reciting poetry in the train station to collect some money, while Matthew is racing to find her. There are also flashbacks to Anne’s mistreatment at the various households she was placed in before going to the orphanage, and bullying and teasing she endured at the orphanage and in the Avonlea School–based on this volume, these are a figment of the screenwriter’s imagination.)

But the book is very enjoyable. Anne is similar to Pollyanna in that her sense of optimism never fails her; she is incapable of feeling despair very long. And she is similar to Sara Crewe (A Little Princess), whose imagination helped her to survive the misery of her life as a servant at Miss Minchin’s school after the death of her father. All four young protagonists inspire young female readers. That they depend on stereotypes of how girls should be does not detract from their charm. All are smart and good students. Anne has a gift for upsetting people, but this is balanced with a gift for apologizing to them afterward.

The characters of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, the elderly brother and sister who adopt Anne, are deliciously drawn. Who could help but love shy Matthew, who is enchanted with Anne from the day she arrives, the result of a mistaken belief that the Cuthberts wanted to adopt a girl and not a boy? And Marilla, straight-laced and strict, who endeavors to make Anne into a plain, sensible girl and who finishes by being transformed from a harsh, unimaginative person into a sweet and loving one?

I read all 38 chapters in about three days and immediately borrowed Anne of Avonlea, but I’m having some trouble getting into that one. I’ll give it some time and see. . . .

It is a pleasure to reread the books of my childhood. And as usual, however pleasant the movie (or TV series), the book is usually better.

#2 – Anne of Avonlea (Duke Classics 2012; originally published 1909)

I finally finished the second volume in the Anne of Green Gables series. I found it rather slow to begin with (see above); not much happens in the first half of the book as Anne, now 16, starts her teaching job at Avonlea School, having given up her plan to attend Redmond College after finding out that Marilla will need help at home due to deteriorating vision. Of course, Anne loves her pupils and they her; only one little boy eventually makes her so angry that she canes him, which in turn causes him to respect her. Another little boy, Paul Irving, becomes Anne’s favorite–a “kindred spirit”. He is living with his grandmother because his mother is dead and his father lives in the U.S.; he and Anne become close. Marilla takes in six-year-old twins Davy and Dora Keith after the death of their mother, a distant cousin, and Anne helps her to raise them–Dora obedient and boring, Davy a little firecracker of mischief and adorableness. Anne befriends a single man, Mr. Harrison, who has moved in nearby, and she and Diana take a wrong turn on their way to visit someone and make the acquaintance of Miss Lavendar Lewis, a romantic middle-aged spinster with a sad history of a lost love (another “kindred spirit!”). Eventually, everybody but Anne pairs off more or less happily–and Cuthbert neighbor Mrs. Rachel Lynde and Marilla decide to live together at Green Gables after the death of Mr. Lynde, thus freeing Anne to go to Redmond–and Anne begins to realize that a future with Gilbert Blythe might be a possibility for her.

January 18: We are continuing to watch Anne With an E and it gets more and more absurd. This article in Vanity Fair tells it like it is: exaggerated, inaccurate, “strays . . . disastrously far” from the original, dark, replete with “winking forward-looking moments”, etc. That said, I am enjoying the series; it just isn’t based, even loosely, on L. M. Montgomery’s book. “Reimagined” might be a better word. This doesn’t make it better; just different. It’s always a risk to watch some director’s vision of a favorite book. Directors seem to feel empowered to do whatever they want in a different medium.

#3 – Anne of the Island (1915)

Number Three in the series, Anne of the Island (covers Anne’s four years at Redmond College in Kingsport on the mainland while she gets her B.A. I could swear I already blogged about this. Why isn’t it here? Anyway, after a lot of misunderstandings, Anne and Gilbert finally decide to marry. Anne gets a job as Principal/Teacher at a high school in Summerside and Gilbert goes off to medical school in Kingsport.

#4 – Anne of Windy Poplars (1936; Bantam Classic Edition published 1987 and reissued in 1992 and 1998)

Number Four in the Anne series follows Anne for her three years in Summerside. She has to win over the notoriously difficult Pringles, who are accustomed to getting their way in the town. Then she takes on the case of Katherine Brooke, Vice Principal/Teacher, who resents Anne’s having been given the position she felt should be hers and who generally makes herself unlikable in every possible way. Of course, Anne’s sunny personality eventually prevails and the two become friends; Katherine takes Anne’s advice and follows a different career path more suited to her interests. Then there is the ongoing story of “Little Elizabeth” Grayson, a sweet but unhappy child who lives with her great-grandmother Mrs. Campbell (a Pringle!) and a servant called only “The Woman”, who provide for her physical needs but not her emotional ones, leaving her starved for affection and imagination (which Anne, of course, is happy to provide). And there are various other shorter challenges with different folks in Summerside (I was pretty confused about where they came from and why), usually resolved in a single chapter. Throughout, Anne boards with “the widows” Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, their ascerbic servant Rebecca Dew, and That Cat (aka Dusty Miller) at the eponymous Windy Poplars, where she can watch the sun both rise and set from her beloved tower room. The story (stories, really) is told partly in third person narrative but mostly via Anne’s letters to Gilbert in Kingsport. (I wished we could have been treated to at least some of Gilbert’s responses, but no.)

I’ve already put Anne’s House of Dreams on hold at the library. I should have it in a few days. 03/20/2022

#5 – Anne’s House of Dreams (original pub date 1922; Bantam Classic edition 1987; second Bantam reissue 1998)

The fifth installment of L. M. Montgomery’s series begins with Anne and Gilbert’s wedding at Green Gables and follows the happy couple to Four Winds, where Gilbert finds them a little house (the eponymous House of Dreams) “halfway between Glen St. Mary and Four Winds Point” (not near Avonlea, but still on Prince Edward Island, where Gilbert will take over his uncle’s medical practice). We meet a host of new characters: Captain Jim Boyd, the keeper of the Four Winds lighthouse; Miss Cornelia, an eccentric neighbor; Susan, the housekeeper; Marshall Elliot, whose long flowing hair and beard he refuses to cut until the Liberals take over the government; the prickly Leslie Moore, whose husband has been disabled in an accident and as a result is expected to live out his days (and hers) with the mind of a two-year-old; and Owen Ford, a writer who spends a vacation at Four Winds, boarding with the Moores.

The main story of the book is Leslie’s. Intelligent and strikingly beautiful, her life has been derailed by her parents and her marriage to a man she does not love. She stubbornly refuses to betray her idiot husband, but she envies Anne her happiness, and their friendship has its ups and downs. By this time, the reader has figured out that Montgomery always wraps her dilemmas up happily, so from the middle of the book one has already figured out that (spoiler alert!) Leslie will end up with Owen Ford, happily ever after.

Anne has two pregnancies while living in the House of Dreams; the first ends tragically, but the second produces a healthy boy whom they name James Matthew, after Capt. Jim and Matthew Cuthbert, and call Jem. And at the end of the story, they leave the House of Dreams to buy a larger house nearer Gilbert’s practice. (4/9/2022)

#6 – Anne of Ingleside – Anne and Gilbert now have six children: Jem, twins Diana and Nan, Walter, Shirley, and Rilla. Most of the book, which is not divided into chapters, concerns crises involving the first four of these (Rilla will get her own book later). Anne figures in their stories as a wise, loving parent who can always help them to sort things out even if she can’t prevent the crises from occurring. But the book is not really about her except at the end, where she and Gilbert have apparently “lost that loving feeling” and have a misunderstanding on their fifteenth anniversary. I was kind of bored with this one.

Wise Child

by Monica Furlong (Random House Sprinters, 1987)

Vicki and I read this together a few years ago, and recently I was inspired to re-read it. In this sequel to Juniper, a young girl nicknamed Wise Child is taken in by the doran (sorceress or witch) Ninnoc (aka Juniper). At first, Wise Child is afraid that terrible things will happen to her, but Juniper slowly wins her trust with her quiet kindness and honesty. Juniper also educates Wise Child in languages, herbal lore, math, astronomy, music and poetry. Wise Child comes to understand that she has it in her to become a doran, but only if she so chooses. She also learns that her birth mother Maeve, who abandoned her but who now wishes to have her back, is also a powerful sorceress, but she uses her power to benefit only herself instead of others, as Juniper does. Wise Child is a Christian, though Juniper is not; and the other Christians of the village, influenced by their priest Fillan, mistrust witchcraft (except when they need Juniper’s herbs and laying on of hands, when their own treatments for illness and injury are ineffective) are easily led to accuse Juniper of bringing smallpox to the village, and she is arrested. Torture and execution seem inevitable, but together with her cousin Colman (who has a book of his own, a sequel to this one, which seems not to be available anywhere for less than about $900!), Wise Child manages to liberate Juniper and they escape towards the Western sea.

I like Wise Child’s description of a doran, which is part of her testimony at Juniper’s trial: It is someone who loves all the creatures of the world, the animals, birds, plants, trees, and people, and who cannot bear to do any of them any harm. It is someone who believes that they are all linked together and that therefore everything can be used to heal the pain and suffering of the world. It is someone who does not hate anybody and who is not frightened of anyone or anything. This passage makes me yearn to be a doran too.

The Fifth of March: A Story of the Boston Massacre

by Ann Rinaldi (Harcourt 1993)

This is the story of young Rachel Marsh, an indentured servant working as a nanny in the home of John and Abigail Adams in 1768-70. Well-researched, with most of its characters based on actual people, The Fifth of March provides a front-row seat to the events leading up to and following the Boston “Massacre”, which is widely seen as a crucial factor in the beginning of the Revolutionary War. As Rachel narrates the story, we gain an understanding of how some of the colonists began to see themselves as just plain “Americans” rather than subjects of the British Crown, as the concept of individual liberty began to take root.   Along with her friends, her employers, and her employers’ friends and associates, Rachel must decide whether to cast her lot with “the rabble” or with the soldiers sent to keep the peace in a turbulent time. We come to appreciate the British side of the story: how the British Captain Preston tried valiantly to avert violence while the Americans insulted, cursed, lobbed objects at, and otherwise provoked the young British soldiers.

Rachel’s choice is complicated by the fact that she has befriended one of the soldiers, Matthew Kilroy (also a historical figure), thereby jeopardizing her relationship with the Adamses. This is the fictional story woven into the historical events. Even Rachel Marsh’s fictional character is based on an actual person of that name whom the Adamses employed. Rinaldi takes this character, about whom essentially nothing is known, and creates her protagonist.

I found this to be a balanced description of what it might have felt like to live in Boston during this period a few years before the Revolutionary War.

Gone Away Lake

by Elizabeth Enright (Harcourt 1957)

This is a simple story of some children who discover an abandoned community near their vacation home. Only two elderly siblings live there, but they are delighted with the children and they all become friends. At first, they keep it a secret, but soon the secret becomes impossible to keep. Nothing particularly exciting or spooky happens. It’s nice that the children and the old folks befriend one another. I was underwhelmed.

Follow My Leader

by James B. Garfield (illustrated by Robert Greiner; Viking Press 1957)

This novel about a young boy who must learn to cope with blindness after a tragic accident was one of my favorite books when I was a child, and I have actually re-read it many times. It can still bring a chuckle to my lips and tears to my eyes. Eleven-year-old Jimmy Carter loses his sight when his friend Mike inadvertently tosses a lit firecracker in his direction. The book follows Jimmy’s progress as he learns to use a white cane, read and write using Braille, and finally gets a guide dog, whom he names Leader. Almost half of the book describes the training Jimmy does at the guide dog school, both before and after he gets the dog. Jimmy learns a lot from his fellow students as well as from the school staff about living as independently as possible. But possibly the most important lesson he learns is from his roommate, 28-year-old Mack. Mack helps Jimmy to realize that hating Mike is useless and toxic, and when he returns home, in addition to going back to school, getting an after-school job (a newspaper corner), and rejoining his Boy Scout troop, he finds a way to forgive his friend.

Along the way, Jimmy’s widowed mother, his younger sister Carolyn, his best friends Chuck and Art, and others, learn valuable lessons about how to act (and how not to act) around a blind person, and by extension, around anyone with a disability. I think this book may have been the first one I ever read which helped me to vicariously experience the life of a person living with a disability. Despite the tremendous changes we have gone through as a culture since the 1950s, I think children today can still benefit from reading Jimmy’s story.

The Trumpet of the Swan

by E. B. White, illustrated by Edward Frascino (Harper & Row, 1970)

Although I’ve read Stuart Little  and am a huge fan of Charlotte’s Web, I had never read E. B. White’s third classic children’s book, so I have now corrected that error. While it does not compare with Charlotte’s Web, it is entertaining and sends a message that disabilities can be overcome with persistence and resourcefulness.

The principal human character in the story is Sam Beaver, a young boy who grows up as the story of Louis the swan unfolds. Sam loves nature and animals and is always ready to help Louis when asked. But his importance to the story is secondary to that of Louis, the Trumpeter Swan who is born mute (not a Mute Swan!). (He is described as having “a speech defect”.) Louis refuses to accept his fate as an outcast in Trumpeter Swan society, and his parents decide that he should learn to play a trumpet of his own. Louis gets Sam to help him attend school to learn to read and write, and little by little, he accumulates a slate, a piece of chalk, and a trumpet,  all of which he carries around his neck and uses to communicate with both humans and other swans. He has many adventures: he plays the trumpet for the Swan Boat at the Boston Public Garden, and in a Philadelphia night club, and he woos and wins his true love, Serena. With Sam’s help, Louis is able to return to his idyllic life in the wild (but he has to agree to occasionally sacrifice  a cygnet to the Philadelphia Zoo, which seems kind of harsh given that Louis himself refuses to stay there).

It’s weird that a swan would think and communicate in English, use the toilet in a hotel room, know how much to tip a waiter, and other oddities, but there are funny passages that made me laugh, and I guess I can say that I enjoyed the book (but it’s definitely not in the same league as Charlotte’s Web!).

The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre

by Gail Carson Levine (Harper 2017)

When I was at the library recently, I picked up two books for myself (neither was on my to-read list, but they looked interesting) and this one for my daughter, who loves The Two Princesses of Bamarre. I gave up on the two “adult” books (The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers by Alfred S. Posamentier and Ingmar Lehmann; and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel) and instead read The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre. 🙂 And enjoyed it.

Gail Carson Levine has written many books inspired by popular fairytales, such as Ella Enchanted (Cinderella) and Fairest (Snow White, sort of). The two Bamarre books are set in a fairytale world of Carson Levine’s own imagining, but there are elements of familiar tales; for example, the heroine, Peregrine (aka Perry), has hair which grows very rapidly and very long; when her adoptive father imprisons her in a tower with no door, Perry uses her hair to enable her friend Willem to climb up to her with food. Other examples are the seven-league boots which she uses to travel from place to place, the magic tablecloth that produces rich, delicious meals for its owner, and the snail shell that enables a person to hear conversations from a great distance. (The boots and the tablecloth also appear in The Two Princesses of Bamarre.)

Perry is a Bamarre, but the Bamarre have been conquered and subjugated by the fierce Lakti. (They are just too kind and empathetic to resist with violence.) As a baby, she is taken from her parents by the barren wife of Lord Tove, a Lakti aristocrat. They take her older sister Annet along for good measure, to serve as Perry’s nurse, leaving their parents bereft. Perry grows up believing herself to be a Lakti, undergoing the harsh training required of all the Lakti, both male and female, to turn them into fierce warriors.

The story takes place mostly when she is about fifteen. A fairy appears to her and reveals the secret of her birth, and announces that it is Perry’s destiny to liberate her people. Most of the book narrates how she manages to do this. There are dragons, gryphons, ogres, and other monsters to fight in the land beyond the Eskern Mountains where the Lakti came from originally, and in New Lakti (the kingdom stolen from the Bamarre by the invading Lakti), there are cruel Lakti, especially Lord Tove, whose all-encompassing love for his daughter turns to murderous hatred once he finds out the secret of her birth.

The treatment of the gentle, polite Bamarre people by the arrogant Lakti is reminiscent of the treatment of African slaves in America by white landowners. Lord Tove considers the Bamarre to be dirty, simple, and animal-like, and thinks nothing of subjecting them to ever-harsher laws. Perry has grown up with this racism, and must confront it in herself before she can accept herself and her birth family. She also has to learn to exist in a very different culture, where no one tells anyone else what to do and everyone’s speech is sprinkled with “Begging your pardon’s”. I enjoyed the small cultural details such as these that Carson Levine invents for her peoples.

There is only one character who appears in both Bamarre books, and that is Perry’s younger brother Drualt, who appears in The Two Princesses of Bamarre as a legendary hero. Presumably, that story of how Princess Addie saves her sister Princess Meryl from the Gray Death takes place many years after the Bamarre escape the persecution of the Lakti by crossing the Eskerns to resettle Old Lakti for themselves.

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief required for all Carson Levine’s books, and this one is no exception!

A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens (edited by Jane Gordon; published by American Book Company in 1904)

Every year on Christmas Eve, my family and I watch the 1984 movie of A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott–it’s our favorite of many versions. This year, after watching the movie, I decided to reread the original novella, which I have in the collection called Christmas Stories (from “Eclectic School Readings”). The book originally belonged to my great-aunt, who was a teacher. I suppose she may have read some of the stories aloud to her classes. Anyway, I was a bit disappointed to realize that the story was edited. (Here is one of several unedited versions I found on Google Books; I should read that!)

Anyway, I read the edited version, since that is what I have. It omits some scenes  (like Scrooge’s visit to the pawn-broker’s shop with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) which both the film and the original story include. But it’s still a wonderful story, a classic. Everyone should know it, whether by reading the story or watching one of the movies based on it.

Like Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol manages to be all about Christmas without ever mentioning Jesus, apart from Tiny Tim, who thought “it might be pleasant to [the people in church] to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.”

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

by Nujood Ali, with Delphine Minoui; translated by Linda Coverdale (Broadway Paperbacks, 2010; ISBN 978-0-307-58967-5)

Nujood Ali was a child of 9 or 10 (she does not know her birthdate) in 2008, living in poverty in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Unable to feed his family, her underemployed, khat-chewing father arranged for her to marry a man from their ancestral village.  He claimed that the man (who was about 30 years old) had pledged “not to touch” her until a year after she got her period. This promise was quickly forgotten, and Nujood was brutally raped the night they arrived at her husband’s family home in the village, which was far from Sana’a and almost completely inaccessible. That night, and the next night, and the next. . . . despite her pleas and screams, despite her attempts to run away and hide from the man she began to call “the monster.” She was in constant pain and felt “dirty inside”. She thought of nothing but how to escape this horrible life and return to her family and her school.

Nujood got her chance on a rare visit to her family in Sana’a. She ran away and went to the courthouse, where she somehow managed to be seen by a sympathetic judge by the name of Abdo. Judge Abdo was appalled when he realized that this little pre-pubescent girl was married and suffering the worst kind of abuse. At that time in Yemen, girls could not legally marry before the age of fifteen; but according to the book, in rural Yemen, this law was frequently broken. Nujood’s case was not at all unusual. What was unusual is that Nujood refused to submit to her fate. She managed to escape; she found her way to the court (taking unfamiliar buses and a taxi), she insisted on seeing a judge, and she persisted until the divorce was granted. Following her historic divorce, the age of marriage in yemen was raised, other Yemeni girls found the courage to seek divorces from older and abusive husbands, and even an eight-year-old Saudi girl was granted a divorce. Nujood Ali is a role model and a hero for many women and girls. For herself, Nujood simply wanted to return to her family and to go back to school, where she was resumed her third-grade studies, but now with a specific career goal in mind: to become a lawyer like Shada Nasser, who represented her in court, helping other girls and women to win their rights. Fortunately, the income from this book has enabled her family to have a somewhat better life; at least, the children are no longer reduced to begging on the street.

Young adults and English language learners should be able to understand the fairly simple style and vocabulary in the book, and they will be inspired by the simple courage of this young child who refused to deny her humanity in order to follow the customs of her culture.

 

The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Harper Trophy; originally published in 1911)

Vicki and I recently watched two movie versions of The Secret Garden; one from 1987, and the other from 1993. This made me curious as to which one was more faithful to the book, so I reread it.  I very much enjoyed revisiting the story of spoiled Mary Lennox, her equally-if-not-more-spoiled cousin Colin Craven, and the strange Dickon Sowerby, who can communicate with wild animals and seems to know everything about animals, gardening, and human nature.

When Mary is orphaned in a cholera epidemic in India, she is sent to live with her eccentric uncle Archibald Craven at Misselthwaite Manor, in Yorkshire. Mr. Craven is still grieving the death of his wife ten years before, is rarely at home, and does not wish to see Mary or anyone else even when he is there.

Mary is an obnoxious child who has been indulged, but never loved. When she follows the sound of crying to her hidden cousin’s room, she meets her match, and so does he. Mary is the first person to refuse to kowtow to Colin, and they become fast friends. Mary finds a way into the locked garden where Colin’s mother had the accident ten years previous that resulted in her death; Dickon helps the two younger children to restore the garden to its former beauty, and Colin finds a reason to live.

It’s a lovely story about the redemption of two lost souls by the eponymous garden. On the negative side is the implication that the climate in India can make people sickly, lazy, and stupid, whereas the climate in England restores them to good health and renders them energetic and clever.

I always wonder why film directors make gratuitous changes in the details (I understand about the changes they have to make to bring a story to the screen.). For example, in the book, Mary’s father was Mrs. Craven’s brother, but in the 1993 film, Mary’s mother was Mrs. Craven’s twin sister, and in the 1987 film, Mary’s father was Archibald Craven’s friend–they weren’t even related. Why not stick to the “facts” as written in cases such as this? Overall, the 1993 film is truer to the book; the 1987 film kills off Dickon in World War I and has Mary and Colin fall in love when they grow up!