Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've never loved any character as much as I love Anne Shirley. It took me until this summer to finally finish Anne of Green Gables, but I am so happy to have finally read this book. Anne helped shape the woman I am today, and so as I read I was eight and eighteen and thirty-one and every age in-between. I've tried a half dozen different ways to phrase what reading this book meant and what I thought about it, but I can't separate the nostalgia from the critique. It's too personal and too defining. The character that Lucy Maud Montgomery created is a part of me in a way that only a few stories and characters have. I wish I could thank Montgomery for giving voice to a part of me I didn't know how to express as a child. Like I said before, I love Anne Shirley. When I wasn't pretending to be Jo March or Laura Ingalls Wilder, it was Anne that I most wanted to be. And in some way, I'd like to think I am like her - teaching and writing and living with my sweetheart in our own little house of dreams. What a happy life it is.

Happy reading--