I’ve been reading my way through the books in the series by LM Montgomery which starts with Anne of Green Gables. The advent of the Kindle has made all of these books easily available to me which is a delight when I remember as a child the problems I had getting hold of them from the local library. It’s taken me a few years and I have now reached Anne of Ingleside. You can read two previous reviews of books in this series here and here.
I loved Anne of Green Gables as a child and on rereading it as an adult (and I can’t say that about all my childhood favourites). The sequels do not reach the level of the original in my view and as the series progresses they are less about Anne and more about her large family of children.
This book is more of a collection of short stories about the family. A couple feature Anne as the main character – in one she has to contend with the overlong visit of an aunt of Gilbert’s and in another she fears that Gilbert no longer loves her. The rest of the stories each feature one of the children.
In Anne’s stories, despite the fact that she reminisces about her childhood, there is little of the old, impetuous and quick tempered girl left in the kindly mother. In the children’s stories all Anne’s children are kind and honest and constantly led astray by their own innocence or the lies of other children.
The stories are amusing and well told but I am not sure at what readers they are aimed. The first book was obviously aimed at the teenaged reader and reflected their experiences but these stories cannot be designed to be read by the young children who are their subjects and are or little interest to Young Adults. Overall, the book is rather unsatisfying but this just may be because I am not the target audience or because it doesn’t, for me, live up to the excellence of Anne of Green Gables.
Anne Is Reading 