Review: Anne of Green Gables

Title: Anne of Green Gables
Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Genre: Fiction
Audience: Independent Reader and older
B & B Rating: ★★★★ 1/2

Summary: Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to bring an orphan boy into their home to help Matthew around the farm.  However, when Matthew goes to the train station to pick up their orphan boy, he instead finds an orphan girl-- the imaginative, spirited Anne.  Marilla determines to keep the girl, and Anne changes the lives of everyone in the town of Avonlea as her own life becomes something not even she could have dreamed of.

Review:  Anne is what Beth March should have been-- kind, giving, sweet, but also spirited, imaginative, and irresistibly charming.  Anne's imagination is deliciously contagious.  I wish I had known her when I was a little girl.  Oh, the adventures we would have had together.  As it was, I developed a serious, serious case of the daydreams while I was reading this book.  I'd find myself staring out the window, thinking of wonderful bits of nothing in particular, with a vague sort of smile on my face.  Entirely Anne's fault.

The characters are, I think, what makes this book so very special.  It's like Miss Montgomery gathered up all the people you'll ever meet and distilled them down into stock characters in their truest, purist forms-- gossips, fussy curmudgeons, brats, best friends... they're all so recognizable.  I know these characters.  In fact, I'm 90% positive that my father is Matthew Cuthbert.

I also love the language of this book, the way everything is written.  Everything is so perfectly written that every line is like a snapshot.  Ugh, I love it so much.  There was actually a line of it that after I read it, I stopped, then reread it about ten thousand times.  Anne is looking at Marilla's amethyst brooch, rambling as usual. The final line is the last line of the chapter, and it literally, for some unknown reason took my breath away.  It is, I think, one of the most perfect lines I have ever read.

“Oh, Marilla, it’s a perfectly elegant brooch. I think amethysts are just sweet. They are what I used to think diamonds were like. Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like. I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones. When I saw a real diamond in a lady’s ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn’t my idea of a diamond. Will you let me hold the brooch for one minute, Marilla? Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?”

Oh, to be able to think of lines like that.  Pardon me as I wistfully sigh.