Anne's House of Dreams
Anne's House of Dreams was a million times better than Anne of Windy Poplars. I think the latter suffered from a whole lot of nostalgia and a poor balancing of ideas. But this book gets back to what I loved about Anne in the first place. She and Gilbert get married and move into their first home together. They meet their new neighbors and begin to make a life for themselves.
This book felt like an actual novel rather than a series of vignettes. It let Anne be human again. A wonderful, irrepressible human who charms everyone she meets and finds ways to solve every problem she comes up against. But it let her be wrong. It let her be disliked (temporarily). It let her experience tragedy and come through the other side.
More importantly, this book introduced Miss Cornelia Bryant, who is officially one of my favorite literary characters ever. A spinster who never has a nice word to say about a man or a mean word to say about a woman. She spends all of her free time sewing clothes and making food for the children in her community. She's a tireless gossip with firmly held opinions. And her catchphrase, "isn't that just like a man", is something I've been repeating to myself at least once a day since I encountered it (A seasonal example: "a child, a child, shivers in the cold, let us bring him solver and gold" "isn't that just like a man?")
This might just be my favorite book in this series. And that's at least half due to Miss Cornelia Bryant. Sure, LM Montgomery twists herself into some interesting knots to give everyone a happy ending. But I so wanted everyone to have a happy ending that I can forgive her that.
This book felt like an actual novel rather than a series of vignettes. It let Anne be human again. A wonderful, irrepressible human who charms everyone she meets and finds ways to solve every problem she comes up against. But it let her be wrong. It let her be disliked (temporarily). It let her experience tragedy and come through the other side.
More importantly, this book introduced Miss Cornelia Bryant, who is officially one of my favorite literary characters ever. A spinster who never has a nice word to say about a man or a mean word to say about a woman. She spends all of her free time sewing clothes and making food for the children in her community. She's a tireless gossip with firmly held opinions. And her catchphrase, "isn't that just like a man", is something I've been repeating to myself at least once a day since I encountered it (A seasonal example: "a child, a child, shivers in the cold, let us bring him solver and gold" "isn't that just like a man?")
This might just be my favorite book in this series. And that's at least half due to Miss Cornelia Bryant. Sure, LM Montgomery twists herself into some interesting knots to give everyone a happy ending. But I so wanted everyone to have a happy ending that I can forgive her that.
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