11 October 2017

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

The Blue CastleThe Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm always a little wary of reading books written before 1950. Because there are things that polite people simply did not say back then, there is a worry that the language will be too vague and I will have to work hard to understand what is going on, a bit like reading Shakespeare. With this book, first published in 1926, I needn't have worried.

The Blue Castle is my first and only experience with L. M. Montgomery's writing, and I can see why people have become enamored of her better-known work, Anne of Green Gables. This story of Valancy, a 29-year-old spinster who finally decides to live a little, is at turns melancholy when describing how stifled she was and joyous when she broke free. The passages describing how clueless Valancy's family members were made the book for me.

The only downside for me was the extensive descriptions of nature. Again, this is just a downside for me, not a slam against the book. You know how some readers skim past the sex scenes in contemporary romances or complain about the repeated descriptions of food and cooking in pioneer romances? That's what I do when authors wax rhapsodic over trees and flowers and the moon. I recognize that Montgomery did a good job creating a mood with her descriptions of Valency's natural surroundings and how they made her feel, so I'm sure the nature lovers out there would enjoy them much more than I did.

Overall, this was an enjoyable book that did not feel as corny or melodramatic as one might expect.

**NOTE** The link in the Goodreads entry for downloading the free ebook leads to an incomplete file. You may want to go to Project Gutenberg Australia directly.

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