Book Review: Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I have been a longtime fan of the Anne of Green Gables made-for-TV movies, starring Megan Follows as Anne. Those films had done such a good job that I thought they’d be impossible to beat, and hence I only finally got around to reading the classic children’s tale, published back in 1908. The book is a very good one, and certainly a great children’s tale, yet it falls just short of the films.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Anne is an orphan who is sent from the orphanage to Prince Edward Island, where she believes adoption awaits by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an older couple - not husband and wife, but brother and sister. Anne is chatty and passionate, and her imagination gets her into loads of trouble, yet when she arrives, Marilla informs her that she in fact wanted a boy. The emotional Anne is distraught, believing that she will be sent back to the Asylum, and she provides quite the contrast to the practical-minded Marilla. Their exchanges are humorous, for when Marilla asks Anne the simple question of “What is your name?” Anne responds with: “Will you please call me Cordelia?” Likewise, Marilla retorts with: “Call you Cordelia! Is that your name?”

Anne is what one would call a “hopeless romantic” who does not like her first name because to her it is not “romantic” enough. Marilla, of course, battles back with: “Unromantic? Fiddlesticks!” and she reminds her what a good, plain, sensible name like Anne really is. (Of course the last thing Anne wants to be is good, plain and sensible). Many of these moments can be found in the films, though the films worked to flesh out more of the exchanges, and of course, there is no compromising the beautiful scenery of Prince Edward Island captured on film.

It is also interesting to compare a book like this to Betty Smith’s great classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I would not be surprised if Smith was impressed by Maud Montgomery’s children’s tale, and allowed some of her literary techniques to percolate into her own thought when composing her own heroine, Francie Nolan. Both female leads are around the same age throughout the stories (Anne goes from being 11-16 and Francie is 11-17), they both are imaginative and have a love of books, yet Anne of Green Gables is clearly a children’s book, for it does not touch upon the deeper and darker issues that A Tree Grows In Brooklyn touches upon. Anne of Green Gables, for example, does not approach the issues of sex, poverty, and violence the way the Betty Smith book does, and it is for those reasons that Anne of Green Gables remains a young adult book, while Smith’s transcends into adult literature.

Article Author: Jessica Schneider

Jessica is the co-founder of the highly popular arts site www.Cosmoetica.com, which has been praised by film critic Roger Ebert and noted in The New York Times. She's been writing fiction, poetry and reviews for more than a decade, and her work has …

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