extremely lovable dumbass

Gleefully ogreish

[batrachised]

WHERE ARE ALL THE LM MONTGOMERY BLOGS ON THIS WEBSITE

[batrachised]

Ulysses S. Grant 🤝 Cousin Stickles

resharing in honor of the book club

[emosad420]

[chtoyalt]

look at him he hasn't done one bad thing in his entire life

[wildhoneyvalancy]

“Great-uncle Richard was there . . . "Wild Dick Gardiner" who had been a sailor and had fought with sharks, and was reputed to have once eaten human flesh.”

From Pat of Silver Bush

Montgomery just was convinced that sailors were cannibals.

@batrachised

[mzannthropy]

So how on earth did Frederick Stirling end up marrying Amelia Wansbarra and what was their marriage like?

[batrachised]

thinking about Uncle Benjamin getting sold to One Direction

[no-where-new-hero]

i am sooooo behind on book club and i’m so mad because these may be my favorite chapters of the whole book!

but i am LIVING for the amount of book clubbers this go-around who latched onto abel being the third-spouse murderer so far!! i don’t remember people discussing this last time and i love it because mrs frederick and uncle james are clearly monstrous people that the narrative condemns, but even roaring abel—who is a neutral to positive figure—still can’t escape the narrative’s theme that it’s IMPERATIVE that you marry the right person. maybe a bolder woman wouldn’t have been killed by his antics! his poor wife probably would have flourished just fine with a milder man.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

vía @batrachised

I've been thinking about this as well as I read you all this time around. Also in part because a friend of mine read the novel for the first time recently, and one of the comments she made to me was that she was glad she has read it now that she's married and not a few years ago when she was single. And that was a striking comment to me. On the one hand because it speaks of how happy she is in the relationship she has with her husband, of course, but also... I was around Valancy's age when I read The Blue Castle for the first time, and it made me FERAL, as the kids say. It made me feel seen, and it fueled a hope of change and of life beyond the confines of mine. Mind you, I was deeply yearning for romantic connection at the time, yet I never felt the book was hurting me emotionally, the way my friend imagined it would have for her.

It sounds silly to put it like this, but now at 32 I don't find Valancy as relatable to my current self as I did. I love her, she's a dear friend, and she's another me the way I have felt about other characters when I was younger. I hardly ever yearn romantically these days. But on the other hand, I'm noticing more these patterns of bad marriages as deeply upsetting. I don't dread being an "old maid", which still to this day carries a few stigmas, but the idea of being in a deeply unsuitable marriage? shudders upon shudders. Not just as something hard, a misfortune, a great sacrifice, but as a thing that slowly asphyxiates you and kills you. Not a sort of giving of yourself to help another become a better version of themselves, the fidelity and love between two broken people, but to just become undone for someone who cannot or does not want to change, or can't even conceive a different, better self.

So I've been thinking about LLM writing this story, a story that feels so raw and personal, and trying to imagine what was going through her heart and mind in the process... heavy stuff.

[cowboyjoshdun]

really love keeping up with my mutuals through their little tags and vent posts. getting updates on how they’re doing is something like: glad to know your job at the library is going well. i’m sorry you haven’t gotten that raise. glad your finals went well. i’m sorry your teacher is so unhelpful. glad your tv show got renewed. i’m sorry they killed your favorite character. glad that you scored tickets to see your favorite artist. i’m sorry they aren’t touring near you at all. glad your cat is doing well. i’m sorry your mom is sick again. glad you’re feeling better now that it’s your favorite season. i’m sorry your meds aren’t working. glad you’re married now. i’m sorry you have to step back for your mental health. glad you’re still here. i’m sorry life is so hard. glad you’re alive, i hope things get easier for you soon

[no-where-new-hero]

this is so chaotic but it IS pride month so. i’m now going to incorporate it into my headcanon that A. Gay, Carpenter might actually be a little fruity. consider: he married late. he didn’t remarry despite having a daughter to raise. and cissy is childishly unaware of what heterosexual sex ends in, but she clearly has never seen her father worry about it either, if he had a fling here and there with a woman.

[batrachised]

this is what I IMMEDIATELY thought of

[moonlightredfern]

This is canon now.

[batrachised]

got diagnosed with the "your vagina is rotting off" autoimmune disease (okay okay, not rotting but atrophying). I'm fine but I do have a collection of jokes I'm desperate to make to people but cannot, and so will inflict upon ya'll:

LMAO? more like LMVO, am I right!?

the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak and getting weaker

you could say my vagina is a prize...literally a-trophy!

(on a dating profile): while supplies last!

my body won't quit, but it has been working overtime, and honey, labor is unionizing

[moonlightredfern]

What's The Blue Castle book club and is it too late to join? I've been OBSESSED with this book for ages and no one ever talks about it.

WELCOME!!

We’re reading through The Blue Castle one chapter per day (taking Saturdays and Sundays off). You can see the full schedule in @dustpileofherown ‘s pinned post. On Monday we will be on chapter 16.

To join just start tagging your posts with #Blue Castle Book Club

We did a readalong in 2023 and began using that tag. This year is the 100th anniversary so we are doing a reread!

The tag stayed surprisingly active even between book clubs so there’s a lot to explore there.

Glad to have you here! Welcome to the Maudience!

[no-where-new-hero]

i am sooooo behind on book club and i’m so mad because these may be my favorite chapters of the whole book!

but i am LIVING for the amount of book clubbers this go-around who latched onto abel being the third-spouse murderer so far!! i don’t remember people discussing this last time and i love it because mrs frederick and uncle james are clearly monstrous people that the narrative condemns, but even roaring abel—who is a neutral to positive figure—still can’t escape the narrative’s theme that it’s IMPERATIVE that you marry the right person. maybe a bolder woman wouldn’t have been killed by his antics! his poor wife probably would have flourished just fine with a milder man.

[no-where-new-hero]

this is so chaotic but it IS pride month so. i’m now going to incorporate it into my headcanon that A. Gay, Carpenter might actually be a little fruity. consider: he married late. he didn’t remarry despite having a daughter to raise. and cissy is childishly unaware of what heterosexual sex ends in, but she clearly has never seen her father worry about it either, if he had a fling here and there with a woman.

[batrachised]

this is what I IMMEDIATELY thought of

[buttercups-in-a-golden-frenzy]

Just thought of another Valancy / Sara Ray parallel!

Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover’s Lane. Never had she felt so utterly colourless and skinny and insignificant.

- The Blue Castle

“We’ve all got to die,” said Sara Ray solemnly, but with a certain relish. It was as if she enjoyed looking forward to something in which nothing, neither an unsympathetic mother, nor the cruel fate which had made her a colourless little nonentity, could prevent her from being the chief performer.

- The Golden Road

[kasandraforever]

Chapter 15

“The worst of this”—Mrs. Frederick hunted for a dry spot on her handkerchief—“is that every one will know now that she is deranged. We can’t keep it a secret any longer. Oh, I cannot bear it!”

Every time I try to feel a tiny bit sorry or understanding for Amelia, then there is something like that.

[starlene]

One of my favourite things about The Blue Castle Book Club (and the previous LMM book clubs I've taken part in) is that even with short chapters, we manage to pick out so many different details and focus on so many different aspects of the text. There's never a day when everyone just goes, yeah, this chapter is about X and I feel Y about it, there's always such a delightful amount of variance.

As a lover of Swedish musical theatre and historical fiction that no one has heard of, I'm used to absolutely minuscule fandoms. And when it comes to those, it's often a bit of an opposite experience, actually: it can sometimes make me feel slightly desperate when the only other person that's ever posted in the tag focuses on a completely different aspect of the work than I do, or interprets it very differently. Like... isn't it enough that there are only two of us on the entire planet that enjoy this thing, do we also have to disagree about it? The universe truly is a lonely, dark, unloving place.

But in the book club, there are enough of us that picking out different aspects of the text doesn't feel lonely at all – instead, it feels like we're building a puzzle or colouring a picture together.

I'm so happy to have stumbled across these book clubs. I don't think I'd ever searched any LMM related tags on this site or anything, so I have no idea why the For You page showed me a post about the Anne of the Island book club back when that was about to happen... but I'm very glad that it did!