Further Chronicles of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery.
Title: Further Chronicles of Avonlea.
Author: L.M. Montgomery.
Genre: Fiction, short stories, YA, children's lit, romance, humour.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1920.
Summary: A collection of 15 short stories that features the fictional Canadian village of Avonlea, where Anne Shirley had grown up, and its residents. In Aunt Cynthia's Persian Cat, a spoiled, pure-bred Persian cat serves as a surprising match-maker when, while being looked after by two unwilling sisters for their rich aunt, it suddenly disappears. In The Materializing of Cecil, Miss Charlotte Holmes invents the dashing Cecil Fenwick of Blakely, New Brunswick, to keep the Avonlea gossips at bay, only to be shocked and at a loss for what to do when he actually comes to the island. In Her Father's Daughter, Rachel Spencer insists on inviting her estranged father to her wedding, to the fury of her mother, Isabella, who had never forgiven her husband for going out to sea. In Jane's Baby, Miss Rosetta Ellis and Mrs. Charlotte Wheeler, two estranged sisters who hadn't spoken in ten years, feud over the child of their recently deceased cousin. In The Dream-Child, a mysterious wailing that she believes to be her dead child's calls grieving mother Josie to the seaside, and while her husband is distraught with her slowly waning sanity, the voice leads them to an unexpected discovery. In The Brother Who Failed, during the Monroes' reunion at the family home in Avonlea, Aunt Isabel tactlessly remarks that Robert is "the only failure" of his siblings, as he has had the least financial success, and his siblings initiate a scheme to restore his self-esteem to show what kind of "success" truly matters. In The Return of Hester, dying Hester Meredith forces her sister Margaret to promise what she had enforced while alive - that she won't marry Hugh Blair, but as the couple continue to be desperately in love, Hester finds a way to right her wrongs. In The Little Brown Book of Miss Emily, Anne and Diana become acquainted with irritating old maid Miss Emily Leith, but upon Miss Emily's death, Anne receives a mysterious parcel that tells the story of Miss Emily Leith's tragic past and her great sacrifice. In Sara's Way, Sara think she despises Lige Baxter, whom everyone believes to be both perfect and a perfect match for her, until a great misfortune befalls him, and the general opinion shifts. In The Son of His Mother, an over-protective mother cannot reconcile that her son has bestowed his affections on the beautiful Damaris Garland and refuses to allow the match and lose him, until tragedy strikes that puts the concept of loss in perspective for her. In The Education of Betty, newly-widowed Sara Churchill arranges for a former beau to tutor her untamed daughter Betty from girlhood to womanhood, with unexpected results on both sides when Betty finally grows up. In Her Selfless Mood, Eunice Carr devotes her life to granting her mother Naomi Holland's deathbed request that she look after Christopher Holland, Naomi's son and Eunice's half-brother. In The Conscience Case of David Bell, David Bell refuses to testify in the name of Jesus Christ, to the horror of Avonlea society and his family, because his conscience is weighed down with a misdeed. In Only a Common Fellow, Phillippa Clark is about to marry Mark Foster, at the insistence of her scheming step-mother, while her heart yearns for Owen Blair, whom she believes to be dead in the war. In Tannis of the Flats, Jerome Carey, telegraph officer in a trading station in the Canadian Northwest, becomes the object of beautiful "half-breed" Tannis Dumont's affections, but unknowing that the girls believes him to be in love due to his innocent flirtations, he falls in love with Elinor Blair of Avonlea.
My rating: 7.5/10
My Review:
♥ Rachel leaned forward, folded her large, capable hands deliberately on the table, and gazed unflinchingly into her mother's bitter face. Her fright and nervousness were gone. Now that the conflict was actually on she found herself rather enjoying it. She wondered a little at herself, and thought that she must be wicked. She was not given to self-analysis, or she might have concluded that it was the sudden assertion of her own personality, so long dominated by her mother's, which she was finding so agreeable.
♥ She was very happy; but her happiness was faintly threaded with the sorrow inseparable from all change.
♥ Isabella Spencer had hated this man; yet her hate had been but a parasite growth on a nobler stem, with no abiding roots of its own. It withered under his words, and lo, there was the old love, fair and strong and beautiful as ever.
~~Her Father's Daughter.
♥ A man's heart - aye, and a woman's too - should be light in the spring. The spirit of resurrection is abroad, calling the life of the world out of its wintry grave, knocking with radiant fingers at the gates of its tomb. It stirs in human hearts, and makes them glad with the old primal gladness they felt in childhood. It quickens human souls, and brings them, if so they will, so close to God that they may clasp hands with Him. It is a time of wonder and renewed life, and a great outward and inward rapture, as of a young angel softly clapping his hands for creation's joy.
♥ It was in the spring that Josephine and I had first loved each other, or, at least, had first come into the full knowledge that we loved. I think that we must have loved each other all our lives, and that each succeeding spring was a word in the revelation of that love, not to be understood until, in the fullness of time, the whole sentence was written out in that most beautiful of all beautiful springs.
♥ ...and so I carried on alone, for grief is ever proud.
~~The Dream-Child.
♥ "Don't give in -- never give in when you have done no wrong."
♥ "I guess," said Aunt Isabel, aside to the little school teacher, as she wiped the tears from her keen old eyes, "that there's a kind of failure that's the best success."
~~The Brother Who Failed.
♥ Then that happened by which, in after days, I was to know that this strange thing was no dream or fancy of mine. Hugh looked not at me, but past me.
"Hester!" he exclaimed, with human fear and horror in his voice.
He leaned against the door-post, the big, strong fellow, trembling from head to foot.
"I have learned," said Hester, "that nothing matters in all God's universe, except love. There is no pride where I have been and no false ideals."
Hugh and I looked into each other's eyes, wondering, and then we knew that we were alone.
~~The Return of Hester.
♥ 'There is nothing I wouldn't suffer if it would do him any good. I never thought any one could feel so. I used tot think if I loved anybody I would want him to do everything for me and wait on me as if I were a princes. But that is not the way at all. Love makes you very humble and you want to do everything yourself for the one you love.'
~~The Little Brown Book of Miss Emily.
♥ The evening was cold and autumnal. There was a fiery red spot out at sea, where the sun had set, and, above it, over the chill, clean, saffron sky, were reefs of purple-black clouds. The river, below the Carewe homestead, was livid. Beyond it, the sea was dark and brooding. It was an evening to make most people shiver and forebode an early winter; but Thyra loved it, as she loved all stern, harshly beautiful things. She would not light a lamp because it would blot out the savage grandeur of sea and sky.
~~The Son of His Mother.
♥ I was broken-hearted...or believed myself to be so, which, in a boy of twenty-two, amounts to pretty much the same thing.
~~The Education of Betty.
♥ At midnight Naomi Holland opened her eyes. The child she had never loved was the only one to go with her to the brink of the Unseen.
"Eunice -- remember!"
It was the faintest whisper. The soul, passing over the threshold of another life, strained back to its only earthly tie.
~~In Her Selfless Mood.
♥ "You have made me love you," said Tannis.
The words sound flat enough on paper. They did not sound flat to Tom, as repeated by Lazarre, and they sounded anything but flat to Carey, hurled at him as hey were by a woman trembling with all the passions of her savage ancestry. Tannis had justified her criticism of poetry. She had said her half-dozen words, instinct with all the despair and pain and wild appeal that all the poetry in the world had ever expressed.
♥ He had not, to be sure, been a villain; but he had been a fool, and that is almost as bad, under some circumstances.
~~Tannis of the Flats.