Very good, wholesome reading This novel is one of the best of the "Anne" series. The plot moves, the characters are well portrayed, and romance keeps the suspense up and the reader engrossed. It is so wonderful to read something written about the turn of the century that isn't full of the filth of so much of today's fiction.
It's okay It doesn't have the charm or enthusiasm of the other books; it is an okay stand-alone, but Anne, Gil, and the 6 Blythe kids are actually background characters, especially Anne and Gilbert! It is okay alone, though.
Halairious This book is, in my opinion, one of the very funniest in the series. Faith Meredith just cracks me up. I got the whole series for christmas, and I am reading them backwards. I just started Anne's House of Dreams today!
And the fine traditions carry over into a new generation... Although this book has little about Anne in it, I think the author was right in focusing on the children. After all, as a mother of 6, I don't think there would be much story to Anne. Obviously her life at this point, even with Susan's help, consisted of working in her home and for her family. This was still during a time when there were few machines to make tasks easier, and the work never ended. All through the book she is there for her children as she was in Anne of Ingleside, but now the story is theirs and that of their friends. She was able to move the story of Anne along while bringing in new characters and fresh storylines. Because of the devices she used, she was able to make the 8th book as interesting as the first one. The author was also possibly employing the same strategies advertisers employ today to sell their wares. She could have been using Anne's name to sell more books. Whatever, it's still a delightful read!
It's hard to stop laughing I was disappointed with the previous segment of the series, so I was not expecting much from Rainbow Valley. Indeed, I put off reading it for a year. I'm sorry now that I did so.
Montgomery returns to the magic and lyricism of the beginning of the Green Gable series. But she does it by leaving Anne. There is only a little about Anne's family, and hardly anything about Anne herself in this book. It is mostly about another family, that of John Meredith, the minister, a widower. By telling the story of this family, and an orphan they befriend, we see some angst in life, some troubles. Which was exactly the problem with the story of Anne's family. She went through many troubles as a girl, but as a mature mother, she had everything perfect. The family was perfect. The marriage was perfect. And it was all quite boring. This is why they don't write about perfect people in the adventure stories that Anne loves. But the Merediths do not have a perfect life, and the troubles they experience, and how they attempt to resolve them, create spice.
These are very believable characters created by Montgomery, and a believable small town focused continually on gossip. It is one of the rare books that does not portray a minister and his family as evil, nor as perfect, but simply as real- perhaps because the book was written in 1919. How the children of the family respond to an emotionally absent father is intriguing, and Faith Meredith's actions the most interesting of them all. I read this on the train from Casablanca to Tangier, and the Moroccans in the train car with me gave me many strange looks as I could not stop laughing uproariously at Faith's actions, nor explain to them what was so amazingly funny.
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