Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery.
Title: Anne of Windy Poplars.
Author: L.M. Montgomery.
Genre: Fiction, YA, children's lit, teen lit.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1915.
Summary: Anne Shirley has left Redmond College behind to begin a new job and a new chapter of her life away from Green Gables. Now she faces a new challenge: the Pringles. They're known as the royal family of Summerside - and they quickly let Anne know she is not the person they had wanted as principal of Summerside High School. But as she settles into the cozy tower room at Windy Poplars, Anne finds she has great allies in the widows Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty - and in their irrepressible housekeeper, Rebecca Dew. As Anne learns Summerside's strangest secrets, winning the support of the prickly Pringles becomes only the first of her triumphs.
My rating: 7.5/10
My Review:
♥ Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods… of the shore… of the meadows… of the night… of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread them are different. I'm sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.
♥ Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.
♥ Aunt Kate is very much disgusted with such superstition. But I believe I rather like superstitious people. They lend color to life. Wouldn't it be a rather drab world if everybody was wise and sensible… and good? What would we find to talk about?
♥ "Nobody is ever too old to dream. And dreams never grow old."
♥ “Oh, won't I hate you tomorrow because I've told you this!"
"Why?”
"We always hate people who surprise our secrets, I suppose," said Nora drearily.
♥ "Sally says they'll fight most of their time but that they'll be happier fighting with each other than agreeing with anybody else.”
♥ "We put an elephant park in our map of fairyland. It is no use looking superior and disdainful, my Gilbert, as I know you will be looking when you read this. Not a bit of use. The world always will have fairies. It can't get along without them. And somebody has to supply them.”
♥ "He's well-to-do and I've always felt he looked down on us because we were poor. But we have our boy… and it don't never matter how poor you are as long as you've got something to love."
Anne looked at Mrs. Merrill with a new respect. Mrs. Merrill was not beautiful, but as her sunken gray eyes met Anne's, something of spirit kinship was acknowledged between them. Anne had never seen Mrs. Merrill before and never saw her again, but she always remembered her as a woman who had attained to the ultimate secret of life. You were never poor as long as you had something to love.
♥ "Babies are such fascinating creatures," said Anne dreamily. "They are what I heard somebody at Redmond call 'terrific bundles of potentialities.' Think of it, Katherine… Homer must have been a baby once… a baby with dimples and great eyes full of light… he couldn't have been blind then, of course."
"What a pity his mother didn't know he was to be Homer," said Katherine.
"But I think I'm glad Judas' mother didn't know he was to be Judas," said Anne softly. "I hope she never did know."
♥ Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!
♥ "Don't let's have any light yet," Hazel had begged, and Anne had responded,
"No… it's lovely here when the dark is your friend, isn't it? When you turn on the light, it makes the dark your enemy… and it glowers in at you resentfully."
♥ Talk about the charm of the uncaught! It's nothing to the charm of the uncatchable.
♥ “I cannot imagine any girl breaking her heart over a man. Men," said Miss Minerva, staring at a photograph of her father… a person with bristling side-whiskers and a hawk-like nose… "have always seemed to me such trivial creatures."