i would love to hear more about your opinions on LM Montgomery's works 👀
Oh, hi! Thanks for dropping me a note. So, I really have only read her Anne books (and, oddly, have yet to read Rilla of Ingleside). I enjoyed them as a preteen, and Anne was one of several fictional redheads that made me want red hair so badly as a kid :D.
I really started to love the books a lot more as an adult. I was working a job that involved a lot of sort of mindless work, which allowed me to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. I got hooked on LibriVox, which is a site that offers free audiobooks of works in the public domain, read by volunteers. I specifically really liked dramatic readings, and thoroughly enjoyed the Anne books that were available via dramatic reading (as well as Little Women and Pride and Prejudice).
I really enjoyed all of the books, but Anne of the Island and Anne's House of Dreams were my favorite. All the girls at Patty's Place in Anne of the Island reminded me a bit of this house I lived in shortly after moving out of my parents' house for good. I lived there with some women I knew through school and church, and we were all varying levels of friends. It was a really sweet, fun time, and I love being reminded of those years.
But, I'm also all for emotional works, and I think that's why I love Anne's House of Dreams best. I really like Anne and Gilbert together, I like the domesticity of them building a life together after they get married in this new place, and I really like all of the new characters as well. Additionally, I like the way the book handled death and tragedy. Anne's proclamation after the loss of Joyce that, "The thought that it may stop hurting sometimes hurts me worse than all else[...]", is something I think anyone who has lost a loved one can relate to. Some of the plot points are a bit more fantastical than the other books, but I still really enjoy it. I like when things work out in the end, even if there is a great deal of heartbreak in the midst of a story, and I think Anne's House of Dreams does just that.
Oh, and since it's on topic, I thought I might share this YouTube channel that I really enjoyed back when they were actively posting videos. Green Gables Fables is a modern take on some of the Anne books, told via vlog, similar to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (though, GGF was done by a bunch of students -- it is admittedly much lower-budget and less-polished than LBD, but I still think it's great). I highly suggest watching using the playlists for Season One and Season Two, as these contain vlogs by characters other than Anne that help fill out the story and that are easy to miss if you're not aware of all the characters' account names. If you want to like...grow attached to Ruby Gillis, this may be the series for you!
If you're interested in the LibriVox dramatic readings I mentioned, they are here (I usually used the iTunes subscription option, I think, since I was always taught not to just download random files from websites. Haha...But I also have no idea if that still even works.):
The quality of reading varies because these are volunteers, but I really like Arielle Lipshaw, who acts as both narrator and the voice of Anne, so I found them really fun and engaging.