Holiday Reads

I just finished two pretty fun Christmas books--both are short story collections and they couldn't have been more different.

First up, Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories, by L. M. Montgomery.  I'm an Anne of Green Gables fan from childhood and by far the best stories in this collection were the two extracted from the series.

The first is from AoGG, when Matthew gives Anne a dress with puffed sleeves--it's the first pretty dress that Anne has ever gotten, and she is thrilled, thankful, and blown away by Matthew's love for her.

The other Anne story was from Windy Poplars, when Katherine Brook comes to Green Gables with Anne over the Christmas holiday.  I always loved that part of the story and it was a joy to reread.

The rest of the stories in the collection were ones that the editor, Rea Wilmshurst, culled from various magazines, circa 1905.  They are fairly conventional stories in which either one of the following happens:
1) A poor family is struggling to have a Christmas for their children and a rich benefactor showers Christmas goodies on them at the last minute.
2)  A fractured family or arguing friends are reunited due to a mistake of some sort that makes them celebrate Christmas together and mend broken fences.

My favorite was one in which a country woman feeds a train car full of various people out of her voluminous hamper when the train is stranded over night on Christmas Eve due to a snowstorm.  The spirit of giving and friendship shines through this one, without it being overly saccharine.

This was a quick book to read, a bit too sweet for my taste, but pure heaven to spend some quality time with Anne again.

The second collection of stories was The Mistletoe Murder: And Other Stories, a set of four stories, by P.D. James.  This is my first time reading James and I can finally appreciate her for the fabulous mystery writer she was.  All four were all well-crafted, tight, and interesting.  The first was a classic country house murder, the second an unreliable narrator, and the third and fourth featured Adam Dalgleish.

The setting was Christmas, but that was really the only thing Christmasy about these stories--no change of heart, no uplifting sentiments, just murder most foul...but very entertaining!

I'm keeping track of my Christmas reading, year to year, here.

Rilla of Ingleside

I finally got around to rereading Rilla of Ingleside, the last in the Anne of Green Gables Series by Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery. Unlike the rest of the Anne books, I'd only read this one once, when I was about 15, and didn't much care for it.  For one thing, Anne is in the shadows for most of the book. And for another, it is focused exclusively on WWI.  Back when I was 15, I was definitely not interested in the least in WWI and wanted more Anne!

Time flies and people change.  Now that we are in the midst of the centennial of the Great War, I am actively seeking out books about WWI and trying to wrap my head around it.  I confess that I still have big gaps when it comes to understanding the flow of the war and the issues before and during it. I found Rilla of Ingleside to be a perfect introduction to the war.

Much of the novel is either extracts from Rilla's journal--she is Anne and Gilbert Blythe's youngest child, and is 15 in 1914--or conversations about the war, with Susan Baker, the Blythe's housekeeper, holding court in her kitchen about the latest news from the front.

In the course of the war, Rilla's three brothers, countless friends, and sweetheart join up, and she matures from a giddy, vain, flibbertigibbet to a lovely earnest, capable, caring woman.  It's classic L.M. Montgomery, with starry eyes, toothsome cookery, bewitching glens and hollows and valleys and meadows, and apt quotations.  It's full of small-town quirkiness, quaint charm, and spirited misunderstandings.  It is sweet and funny and warm, but it is also poignant and patriotic and threaded with the tragedy of senseless destruction.

Much as I love historical fiction, I really valued the fact that Montgomery wrote this novel in 1921, just three years after the end of the war.  I felt that she must've responded to the war in much the same way that the Blythe family did. Pouring over newspaper reports, studying maps, debating military strategy, praying that the lines would hold, raising the flag over victories, and working hard to keep the faith over defeats.  

Rilla felt personal in a way that, much as I love the other Anne books, they do not.  In reading Rilla, I feel like I had an insight into what Canadians living through the Great War thought and felt about it, how they responded to their role in the global conflict, and how they viewed not only England and France, but also the U.S. and its late involvement in the war.

Rereading Rilla now, I can fully understand why I didn't like it as a teenager.   It wasn't what I wanted an Anne book to be.  That said, I thought it was wonderful.  Despite the sadness (and there are some very sad parts), Rilla is still definitely a feel-good book.

Final thought--I couldn't help but do the math and realize that if Rilla and Ken Ford, her sweetheart, do marry and have children right away, as expected, their children will be of age to march off to WWII in 1939-1945.  L.M. Montgomery died in 1942 at the age of 68.  Recently, it has been revealed that she suffered from depression and her death was possibly a suicide.  I can't help but wonder if seeing the world enveloped in yet another catastrophic war after soldiering through the first one was too much to bear.  I don't mean to end this post on a downer.

Rilla is a lovely, warm, uplifting novel from an author whose works shaped me into the person I am today.  It's also a great way to get a handle on the outline of the Great War.

This is the first book in my Back to the Classics challenge for 2015, nicely fitting into the category of Classic Children's Book.

Jane of Lantern Hill - L.M. Montgomery

I grew up rereading L.M. Montgomery's Anne books and routinely credit them for helping shape me into the person I am today--someone who loves to read, enjoys rural life and finds solace in nature, but also loves being part of a community, etc.

Until last year when I read Montgomery's The Blue Castle, I hadn't tried any of her books outside of the Anne canon.  Now that I've read Jane of Lantern Hill, I really regret being such a purest.  Jane of LH is wonderful and has all the best elements of my favorite Anne stories--a sympathetic, intelligent but not overly sweet heroine, a large cast of quirky secondary characters who serve as either chums or foils, lots of roaming around Price Edward Island (literally seems like heaven on earth to me!), a bit of mystery, and good surrogate parents.

The last isn't entirely true because unlike most Montgomery heroines, Jane's parents, while estranged, are both alive.  Jane Stuart isn't an orphan, but at the beginning she might as well be as her mother is a prisoner of her own weak character and can't pull herself out of the mire and actually be a good mother to Jane. When her father sends for her, the summer of her 11th year, she has only just found out she actually has a living father.  Jane's father, Andrew Stuart, is perfect--a writer, a philosopher, a chum, a sympathetic listener who sees the spark of brilliance in his daughter and allows it to shine.

Jane's mother and grandmother and most of her family in Toronto are uniformly dreadful in various ways, and it's interesting how Jane is one person in Toronto and really a much different person on PEI.  The novel isn't brilliantly written--it's not a masterpiece of plot and the writing is a bit uneven--but it was such a treat to read.  I felt nostalgic even though it was my first time reading it--I could imagine loving it as a child, and that was enough to make me feel glad inside.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill was the last fiction she wrote. Published in 1937, Jane of Lantern Hill depicts a PEI that is a bit changed from that which Anne roamed, but not a whole lot--the Milky Way still shines undimmed by city lights, the sea and shore merge with farmland, hills, and woods, providing an idyllic place to live and grow and thrive.  I read that Montgomery started a sequel in 1939, but died in 1942, leaving it unfinished.

In 1990, Kevin Sullivan did a TV movie called Lantern Hill.  From what I gather, he took most of the characters and the basic premise and then plunked a ghost story on top of it.  I've been toying with watching it because I love the idea of Sam Waterson playing Andrew Stuart--seems like ideal casting to me--but a quick Twitter poll has convinced me that Sullivan did a hatchet job on Jane in the same way that he did with the final Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story, which is loathed by Anne fans worldwide.

This book qualifies in my Back to the Classics Challenge as a classic by a woman author.

L.M. Montgomery Reading Challenge

Since I already am planning to continue reading beyond the Anne-books by L.M. Montgomery, the 5th annual L.M. Montgomery Reading Challenge, hosted by Reading to Know, seemed like a good challenge for me...especially since a copy of Jane of Lantern Hill is on its way to my house and I have committed to reading it this year.

I would also like to reread Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, and perhaps Rilla of Ingleside as part of my WWI 100th anniversary reading.  I know a lot of people are fans of Rilla but I didn't care for it the one time I read it forever ago and I'd like to give it another chance.

I read The Blue Castle in 2013, and enjoyed it very much.  In a nutshell, it struck me as a story about an Anne-type of person who didn't have the good fortune to be adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert.

I have been longing to visit PEI all of my life, and I think I'm honing in on a trip to this wonderful island in 2015, so this challenge will be one way to prep for that trip.

The Blue Castle

I count the Anne of Green Gables series among the formative books of my life. I read them countless times as a child, teen, and young adult, though it has been many years since I read them end-to-end.  However, I never dipped into any of L.M. Montgomery's other books, until this past week.

As part of the Back-to-the-Classics challenge, I decided to read Montgomery's The Blue Castle for Children's/Young Adult category.  Actually, however, the front flap of the newly issued Hesperus Press Limited edition that I read said that The Blue Castle is one of Montgomery's "only novels intended for an adult audience."  Be that as it may, it still read as a YA book to me.  Despite the grim premise--a desperately unhappy 29-year old woman is told she has a terminal illness and only has a year to live--it is replete with the enchanting descriptions of the magical powers of nature that characterize the AoGG stories.  

For example:

The garden was lying in the magic of the warm, odorous July twilight. A few stars were out and the robins were calling through the velvety silences of the barrens.

The whimsically named Valancy Stirling is definitely a kindred spirit of Anne Shirley, and shares with her a beautiful core that eventually shines through the shabby exterior.  Montgomery frequently describes Valancy in language similar to that she used for Anne: "She really looked like a wild elf strayed out of the greenwood."

What I really liked about The Blue Castle was Valancy's willingness to finally take responsibility for her own happiness.  There is a harshness and bitterness in Valancy that you never see in Anne, but then Anne found a family and love and security at age 11...better late than never!  In a way, this is a "what-if" Anne story.  What if Anne hadn't been adopted by the Cuthberts when she was 11--what if she had to continue to soldier on, unloved, unwanted, unappreciated, not understood?  

The message of The Blue Castle is powerful--you can escape into a dreamland, you can construct a beautiful blue castle in your head if that's what you need to get you through times of darkness and loneliness--but if you want to live, you have to act, break out, break away, and make that blue castle a reality.

The writing is a bit precious and the romance a bit contrived, but I enjoyed reading this book immensely.  Like visiting an old friend but one who has new stories to tell.