Anne Shirley: my continuing obsession

Since I first read Anne of Green Gables I have wanted to visit Prince Edward Island, home of both L M Montgomery and her much-loved characters. Last summer, I wrote here about achieving that ambition. I said then that I wanted to re-read all the books in the series - and now I have! There are 8 books directly about Anne and her family, plus two Chronicles which are essentially short stories about other people in which Anne occasionally appears. In order, they are:

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of Windy Willows (sometimes called Windy Poplars)
Anne's House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside 

Some I borrowed from the library, most were available as free ebooks and a few I had to pay a small amount to download. So what did I think? I was a little disappointed. I love Anne of Green Gables. It's a strong story, the three main characters are believable and lovable and the relationships between them beautifully drawn. If you're reading this, you probably know the story already, so I won't go over it here, but I will say the other books can't match it. Anne grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe, her sort-of-childhood-sweetheart, and has a large family. It's all a bit ordinary. After Anne's House of Dreams, the books are really about her children anyway, and Anne retreats into the background as an idealised mother figure.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the books - I did, but there was an element of perseverance to reading them, each one striking me as dull to start with so that I had to struggle to get into them. I could always have told you the plot of Green Gables, but the sequels had left very little impression. Some examples: I had totally forgotten how pious the language was - perhaps, as a daughter of the manse myself, this hadn't struck me quite so forcibly as a child as it does now. However, as the manse I grew up in was Methodist, I'm amazed I didn't remember the strong anti-Methodist prejudice of Miss Cornelia who appears in the later books. I was fairly sure during Anne's first pregnancy that it ended badly, and the sadness of little Joyce's death confirmed this. In the same book, House of Dreams, there was a sub-plot which I vaguely remembered about a young woman whose husband had come home from sea brain-damaged, but I wasn't at all prepared for the dramatic denouement. The things I did remember vividly were often small ones such as the phrase "crossing the bar" for the death of an old sea-captain and Anne's preference for the word "dusk" rather than "twilight"', which I didn't agree with at the time but do now.

I though the best sequel was the last one. In Rilla of Ingleside, which concentrates on Anne's youngest daughter, we again have a single protagonist with real personality. Rilla is also more dramatic because it's set against the background of World War 1 with unbearable tension as all the young men volunteer to fight for the mother-country. I just knew they couldn't all come back, but didn't know which one/s would be lost. Another strong point of the book is that Susan - housekeeper for most of Anne's marriage - comes into her own. Always a faintly comic figure, she adds to this both fierce patriotism and an unsuspected talent as a military tactician. If only the generals could have listened to her!

I'm glad I undertook this project, but feel I've exhausted the obsession for the meantime and Anne can go back on her shelf until I need her again. However, it has started me thinking about other places I have visited because of a character in a book. My first trip to the US included a visit to Provincetown, original home of Dicey Tillerman, another spirited heroine from a series by Cynthia Voigt. I have the first book (Homecoming) on my shelves and might just start there!

Booktrust Teenage Prize

"A bit like Rain Man but much better, and without Tom Cruise." So said Chair of Judges, Tony Bradman, of Unhooking the moon which today won Gregory Hughes the Booktrust Teenage Prize. It's the story of two siblings, 10 year old Rat and her big brother Bob, who set off from Winnipeg after their father dies to search for their only known relative in New York. I can't tell you much more than that since the book hasn't arrived in the Library yet, but I can't wait to get my hands on it after reading about it today. Here's the Booktrust announcement, the Books for Keeps review, the Bookbag and two articles from the Guardian, one mainly on the book and the other on the author. The subject matter, a road trip with unforgettable charcters, also reminds me of the Dicey Tillerman books by Cynthia Voigt, starting with The homecoming, which we do have and which I heartily recommend.



PS Booktrust interview with Gregory Hughes added 4/11/10

Heroes / sheroes

Lucy Coats has responded to the Guardian's illustrated list of 10 of the best children's book heroes with a poll of her own. She doesn't agree with all the Guardian's choices - read why on her blog, Scribble City Central, where she's asking you to come up with your own top 5 heroes and sheroes. You have to do this by Friday 19th when she will collate the entries and come up with two top 5s. There are prizes to win too! I haven't got my own top 5s together yet but I've backed up the person who voted for Cynthia Voigt's Dicey Tillerman. Homecoming is one of my favourite books, about a young girl whose mother has abandoned her family. Dicey leads her younger brothers and sister on a long journey to find their estranged grandmother. She's a great character - see our catalogue for this and Cynthia's other titles and please borrow them and read them!

Horn Book

The May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine has just arrived. It has a running theme of "Food for thought" with various food-related snippets, and a longer article by Linda Sue Park: Still hot: great food moments in children's literature. Food is deeply ingrained in our different cultures - apparently, it is only the fourth thing that immigrants lose through the generations after dress, language and religion. Park approaches the subject both as a writer (using food can identify characters and settings, and putting people together to develop relationships is easily done over a meal) and as a reader (she goes through each meal of the day picking out favourite passages from books). I was delighted that for dinner she picked a section from one of my favourite books - Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. Not read it? Then you're missing a wonderful heroine, Dicey Tillerman, who leads her younger siblings on a walk hundreds of miles long to reach their estranged grandmother when their mother disappears. It's the start of a series, so lots more in store after that.

Other articles include an interview with Sarah Dessen. I hadn't heard of her, but we do have one of her books, Truth about forever (Puffin, 2008), a teenage novel in which the death of the heroine's father takes place before the book actually begins, but sets in motion all the things that happen to her. Lizza Aiken writes about her mother, the respected children's author Joan Aiken, and Debby Dahl Edwardson writes about the implications of worldview in children's books, those that reflect the child's own worldview and those that allow them insight into another culture. She uses the experience of her own children growing up in Alaska to illustrate this. Finally, Janet Hamilton asks What makes a good science book?

Check out the Horn Book in the library, or see its website.