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sophia_sol) wrote2018-06-24 03:15 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-06-24 03:15 pm
Anne of Green Gables series, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Once upon a time when I was much younger I attempted to read Anne of Green Gables because a) it's deeply popular, and b) I loved Lucy Maud Montgomery's other books. But I failed miserably at getting through the first book because I COULD NOT HANDLE my embarrassment at watching Anne get into one scrape after another. So I came to the conclusion that the Anne books were forever lost to me.
But recentlyish I had a revelation at the hands ofverity that I could just....skip the books in which Anne is a scrape-prone child, and pick the series up later. So I did! (I also skipped later books that looked like they would be largely about the scrapes Anne's children get into.)
It took me a bit of time to warm up to Anne; she's a little too serious-minded, dreamy, and romantic for me to ever feel like I got her. But I enjoyed her books and I'm glad to have been able to get around to reading the parts of this series I can read!
The first one I read, Anne of the Island, is a charming novel about a young woman who goes off to college together with a few of her other friends, in an era when getting a B.A. means something. There was surprisingly little focus on the school aspect of this school novel, but I liked hanging out with Anne and her friends, and I particularly loved Phil.
The next one, Anne of Windy Poplars, involves Anne going away to a different town to be the principal of a 3-teacher school. I enjoyed this one more than Anne of the Island. I liked much of the wide cast of characters in this novel, from the three women who live in the house where Anne boards, to the difficulties with the pre-eminent family of the town who wanted someone else to be principal and want to make it clear to Anne that she's not welcome, and so forth. And I enjoyed that much of the book was written as letters from Anne to Gilbert!
Next is Anne's House of Dreams, which is pleasant enough, but by this point I was getting a little tired of the constant heterosexual matchmaking for the vast majority of any not-already-married secondary characters in this series. In this book even Miss Cornelia gets married despite her well-aired opinions on the general uselessness of men! And the single Captain Jim got the tragic love-story from his past celebrated in the novel written about his life. I do enjoy how wholeheartedly Anne throws herself into friendships though. When she loves a friend she really means it.
And last of the Anne novels not involving childhood hijinks is Rilla of Ingleside. Different than the previous three I read in that it focuses on the next generation, not on Anne herself. And also different in that it's a book with much higher stakes than the other books in this series: it's set during the first World War. This book has more depth to it than the other books in the series, with the characters going through some really emotionally difficult things, but it's also an odd experience to read as a pacifist. Hoo boy do I have complicated emotions about this book.
I was hoping that over the course of the book as the war drags on and the realities of its awfulness become clearer to the characters, the book would get a little less... rah rah pro-war patriotic, and a little more nuanced. But it doesn't. War is heroic and ennobling, and killing the enemy is the honourable thing to do for the cause of fighting on behalf of your nation.
The only sympathetic character who doesn't want to fight gets a character arc of getting over his feelings and going off to be a soldier and dying bravely in the sure knowledge that he's done the right thing. And the only pacifist character is mean-spirited, unpleasant, and selfish, and everyone's gleefully satisfied when he gets a very public comeuppance.
And like, I get that it war is a complicated thing. I am personally strongly anti-war, but I understand why various cultural influences and pressures as well as different ethical decision-making frameworks result in other people having different opinions from me. But for a book to be this drastically one-sided on the side of war is just really uncomfortable to me, when I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if war wasn't a thing ever.
And yet the book is well written enough that my heartstrings are tugged by all of it anyway! SIGH.
Another complaint I have is in the romance. Rilla's love interest Ken barely appears on the pages of this book and we don't get to find out, like, anything about his personality or anything, plus we don't hardly get to see Rilla and Ken interact which makes it rather hard to cheer for the romance. Maybe Ken had more personality in the books I skipped and the reader is supposed to bring that knowledge of him here? But reading this as a stand-alone book, it just feels like Ken is such a nonentity!
And by the end of the book Rilla has grown and changed so much in the years since last time she saw Ken - and presumably Ken has been changed by his experiences too - and given that we hardly got to see anything of their epistolary communication (or even get told much of what it entailed) it's really hard to believe that the two of them know each other anymore. So having the book end by focusing on rekindling their relationship in a dialogue exchange of only six words just...feels like it's not quite the thing.
But Rilla herself is a delightful and engaging character, and it's wonderful to see her grow up over the course of the novel. I care about Rilla a lot and so despite my various misgivings about the novel's themes and choices I still really enjoyed it overall.
But recentlyish I had a revelation at the hands of
verity that I could just....skip the books in which Anne is a scrape-prone child, and pick the series up later. So I did! (I also skipped later books that looked like they would be largely about the scrapes Anne's children get into.)It took me a bit of time to warm up to Anne; she's a little too serious-minded, dreamy, and romantic for me to ever feel like I got her. But I enjoyed her books and I'm glad to have been able to get around to reading the parts of this series I can read!
The first one I read, Anne of the Island, is a charming novel about a young woman who goes off to college together with a few of her other friends, in an era when getting a B.A. means something. There was surprisingly little focus on the school aspect of this school novel, but I liked hanging out with Anne and her friends, and I particularly loved Phil.
The next one, Anne of Windy Poplars, involves Anne going away to a different town to be the principal of a 3-teacher school. I enjoyed this one more than Anne of the Island. I liked much of the wide cast of characters in this novel, from the three women who live in the house where Anne boards, to the difficulties with the pre-eminent family of the town who wanted someone else to be principal and want to make it clear to Anne that she's not welcome, and so forth. And I enjoyed that much of the book was written as letters from Anne to Gilbert!
Next is Anne's House of Dreams, which is pleasant enough, but by this point I was getting a little tired of the constant heterosexual matchmaking for the vast majority of any not-already-married secondary characters in this series. In this book even Miss Cornelia gets married despite her well-aired opinions on the general uselessness of men! And the single Captain Jim got the tragic love-story from his past celebrated in the novel written about his life. I do enjoy how wholeheartedly Anne throws herself into friendships though. When she loves a friend she really means it.
And last of the Anne novels not involving childhood hijinks is Rilla of Ingleside. Different than the previous three I read in that it focuses on the next generation, not on Anne herself. And also different in that it's a book with much higher stakes than the other books in this series: it's set during the first World War. This book has more depth to it than the other books in the series, with the characters going through some really emotionally difficult things, but it's also an odd experience to read as a pacifist. Hoo boy do I have complicated emotions about this book.
I was hoping that over the course of the book as the war drags on and the realities of its awfulness become clearer to the characters, the book would get a little less... rah rah pro-war patriotic, and a little more nuanced. But it doesn't. War is heroic and ennobling, and killing the enemy is the honourable thing to do for the cause of fighting on behalf of your nation.
The only sympathetic character who doesn't want to fight gets a character arc of getting over his feelings and going off to be a soldier and dying bravely in the sure knowledge that he's done the right thing. And the only pacifist character is mean-spirited, unpleasant, and selfish, and everyone's gleefully satisfied when he gets a very public comeuppance.
And like, I get that it war is a complicated thing. I am personally strongly anti-war, but I understand why various cultural influences and pressures as well as different ethical decision-making frameworks result in other people having different opinions from me. But for a book to be this drastically one-sided on the side of war is just really uncomfortable to me, when I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if war wasn't a thing ever.
And yet the book is well written enough that my heartstrings are tugged by all of it anyway! SIGH.
Another complaint I have is in the romance. Rilla's love interest Ken barely appears on the pages of this book and we don't get to find out, like, anything about his personality or anything, plus we don't hardly get to see Rilla and Ken interact which makes it rather hard to cheer for the romance. Maybe Ken had more personality in the books I skipped and the reader is supposed to bring that knowledge of him here? But reading this as a stand-alone book, it just feels like Ken is such a nonentity!
And by the end of the book Rilla has grown and changed so much in the years since last time she saw Ken - and presumably Ken has been changed by his experiences too - and given that we hardly got to see anything of their epistolary communication (or even get told much of what it entailed) it's really hard to believe that the two of them know each other anymore. So having the book end by focusing on rekindling their relationship in a dialogue exchange of only six words just...feels like it's not quite the thing.
But Rilla herself is a delightful and engaging character, and it's wonderful to see her grow up over the course of the novel. I care about Rilla a lot and so despite my various misgivings about the novel's themes and choices I still really enjoyed it overall.