Review: Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

This was another quick and enjoyable read from the Anne of Green Gables series. There wasn’t an oversaturation of side-characters as there had been in other books with enough mention of characters outside of the periphery to remind you that they still existed without it becoming overwhelming. The side-characters that were present were well developed and I found myself caring about them more than previous ones, especially the story about Leslie and Dick/George Moore.

However, Anne’s pregnancies and the loss of baby Joyce, I feel, were handled poorly. Firstly, I didn’t even realise Anne was pregnant until she was almost giving birth in both cases and secondly, the loss of Joyce was covered only in half as much detail as I thought would be necessary for the reader and Anne to understand the weight of the situation. I understand that I’m writing this from a modern perspective where child mortality levels are much lower and post-natal depression and other related topics are discussed more openly, but brushing this storyline aside so quickly, in my opinion, did this book a great disservice.

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Review: Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Though I enjoyed reading this book, the parts of the first two books in the Anne of Green Gables series that I didn’t like only became more amplified in this novel.

Firstly, everyone seems to love Anne. In the first couple of books I would go along with this to a certain extent because a lot of the people introduced were children and Anne herself was a child, so you have people who are likely to like someone on first impression and someone who is easily likable. But in this book, the stream of people who adored Anne for seemingly nothing was endless. If I am counting right, she was proposed to six times by five different people and some of them she barely knew. Did they propose just because she is that likable? I wouldn’t mind as much if proper reason was given to them liking her, but I couldn’t find much to suggest that she would be so universally adored.

Secondly, there was another large introduction of secondary characters in this book. This was of course necessary with Anne going to study at Redmond, but a lot were never expanded upon more than appearance and Anne’s opinion on them. It got annoying because I wanted to be able to form my own opinion on them based on their actions, but it seemed that most of their actions only reflected the necessary points of Anne’s plot. It’s a shame because I feel like this book would have been so much richer if it hadn’t been that way.

Having said all that, I did still enjoy this book and I did want to know what was going to happen in Anne’s life, though I do think the main reason was to see whether Anne and Gilbert would end up together, which I knew already, but still interested me.

[Goodreads parallel]