Current Book Club Selection
Past Book Club Selections
Book Picks by
Jenny McWha
- Smile, by Raina Telgemeier
- 4 Book Series by Megan Whalen Turner
- Darklight by Lesley Livingston
- Moving On Up - How to navigate the Bookstore
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
- Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
- The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
- Blubber, by Judy Blume
- Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
- What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell
- Before Green Gables
- The Classics
- Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
- Cathy's Book, by Jordan Weisman and Sean Stewart
- Does my head look big in this? by Randa Abdel Fattah
- Ophelia, by Lisa Klein
- Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Before Green Gables
BOOK REVIEW, October 2008, Jenny McWha
Before Green Gables
The Prequel To 'Anne Of Green Gables'
by Budge Willson
Early this year, I was pretty excited when I saw that Prince Edward Island, as well as the rest of Canada, would be celebrating 100 Years of Anne. Anne of Green Gables, that is. I had been reading the series over the past few years, and had simply fallen in love with the lovable orphaned redhead (I had already fallen in love with P.E.I. during a family vacation at the age of six). Yet I wasn’t so sure about this new book the papers were writing about—a prequel to my beloved books written by children’s author Budge Wilson entitled ‘Before Green Gables.’
THE GOOD: The book chronicles Anne Shirley’s life before moving to Avonlea and having all the adventures that author L.M. Montgomery covered in eight books. But Wilson ensures that Anne’s life before the books start was just as exciting. The book follows Anne’s birth, her parent’s death, and her very sad life of being passed off from one family to another, working more than any child should. Yet there is always an underlying hope in Anne’s story—her love of words, the lives she changes with her enthusiasm and love of life, her wonderful spirit that can never be crushed. In this, Wilson did an excellent job. She took a few lines from the original books and built a whole wonderful story around them. She also puts in little tidbits for the diligent Anne reader—ironic twists like Anne’s father’s passion for geometry or a teacher who ignites her love of the red beaches of Prince Edward Island. The author couldn’t have written Anne better, had her down to a ‘T’. There would be no doubt in any reader’s mind that this Anne is the same little girl who Mathew Cuthbert finds at an empty train station. Writing in another author’s world can be difficult, but Budge Wilson did a wonderful job, convincing me without a doubt that this was exactly where the chatty, imaginative, red-haired orphan came from. My fears were definitely for nothing!
DOWNSIDE: I most certainly enjoyed the characters and the story of this book, but I felt the writing left a tiny bit to be desired. One thing that I love about Anne of Green Gables was that Montgomery was not afraid to challenge her readers with long words and detailed (and gorgeous) descriptions of landscape. I found that Wilson almost shied away from making her writing too hard to read. I know from personal experience what kids can read, and making the book a bit more challenging would most certainly have not put most kids off reading it. It needed to be a bit more complicated just to fit Anne’s personality! Yet, I found that Wilson would scatter fairly hard words randomly throughout the story (I don’t know about you, but I just learned what ‘cacophony’ meant in Grade 12 Advanced English). Other than that, I loved it.
GENRE: You could call this historical fiction, but the original stories were written in the time period they were set in. Children’s literature, I suppose.
RATING: Anyone and everyone can read this book, from childhood to one hundred. One and a halif thumbs up!
OTHER BOOKS: Looking for more Anne? Try the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery. She wrote a LOT of other wonderful books, like Emily of New Moon and Pat of Silver Bush. Budge Wilson is also the author of many children’s books
that you may want to explore further. She seems like a good writer to me!
~ Jenny
