Anne of Green Gables

4.5 stars. This was truly a very wholesome and winning book. At first I was a little thrown off by the story when we first start, but I slowly got into the groove of things and really enjoyed seeing how Anne grows up in Avonlea.

The book is pretty straightforward. Eleven year old Anne Shirley gets mistakenly adopted by the Cuthbert siblings, who are getting on in years and had initially wanted to bring in a little boy to hopefully help out with the farm as Matthew Cuthbert gets older.

Anne is a bit of a departure from a little girl protagonist that you might expect from a book written in the 19th century. Instead of being this idealistic version of little girls where she's calm, dainty, and does everything morally right according to her lessons, Anne is almost a tornado in comparison, albeit a good-willed one. Her dialogue, or should I say soliloquy, fills pages and pages of the book as she rambles on about everything and nothing in particular. She's a right drama queen at her first appearance, swooning over how beautiful everything around her is, and insisting on calling landmarks names she made up on the spot, like, “The Lake of Shining Water” instead of just Barry's Pond. Her highest prized trait of herself is her vivid imagination, and something which she prizes other people by as well.

To be honest, I found Anne pretty annoying at the beginning. She reminded me of Marianne from Sense & Sensibility in what a drama queen she was. Aside from her endless chatter, she also formed attachments to people based on a projection of her own ideals (“I really want a bosom friend, therefore I've decided that this person is going to be my bosom friend even though I've never met her before”). Similarly, she also doesn't seem to know how to appropriately weigh situations and its consequences, although I suppose this is a pretty accurate depiction of children as a whole, where rewards and punishments never seem to matter that much once the day passes and they forget all about it.

The storytelling is pretty episodic in nature and we get to have fleeting introductions to the Avonlea ensemble through Anne's childhood adventures. Of them all, we are perhaps closest in action to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, and Diana Barry. Both Marilla and Matthew behave as parent figures as Anne, and they both have their faults while executing their function here, but I feel like I'm more aligned with Marilla than Matthew. Sure, she's way too severe sometimes and her deliberate self-oppression of her emotions gets on my nerves sometimes, but ultimately she was trying her best to help Anne grow up into her version of a proper lady. If Marilla had tried to single-parent Anne, she would've certainly been able to do it, but I doubt the same can be said for Matthew. Matthew's influence was still a beneficial and valuable one to have to temper Marilla's style of child-rearing, but it was sometimes annoying when he shirked the difficult tasks in life and very gladly palmed it off on Marilla.

What I found masterful about the book was really the last third of it:
I semi-loved it when Anne slowly grew up from eleven to fifteen, from a little girl to a young lady in her own right. I say "semi-love" because I felt like Montgomery did such a great job in aligning us the readers with Marilla's perspective. I found it bittersweet that the little Anne I found so annoying all those chapters ago has disappeared in place of this not-so-romantic, less chatty, and more regular-adult young lady. It's not to say that sixteen year old Anne is a whole different person, but even Marilla explicitly asks her what happened to her imagination and her Storytelling Clubs and all that, and Anne casually just dismisses them all. Instead of being driven by romantic notions and dresses and imagined horrors in the woods, Anne becomes driven by ambition and scholarships and a sense of filial duty to Marilla by the end of the novel. These are great developments for any child to have, but perhaps because I'm a new parent myself, it really hits hard that even when your child is following a trajectory you can be proud of, you're still sad that the baby/small child that they used to be is gone forever. The part where Marilla weeps over how the talkative eleven year old Anne she used to be so annoyed with has now vanished was so heartbreaking to read and I'll admit I absolutely bawled during that part, thinking about how even in the best case scenarios, my baby isn't going to stay a baby for long. Any book that can make me cry in earnest is automatically elevated a few notches by my standards.

Overall, a really great, light-hearted book and I can certainly see why it became a classic. I'm actually interested in continuing the series to see what happens next!