АННА ИЗ АВОНЛИ

Anne Shirley is sixteen, newly appointed as the schoolteacher of Avonlea, and entirely unprepared for the discovery that the world outside Green Gables is considerably more complicated — and considerably more interesting — than any book she has read about it. Anne has grown up — a little. The red hair is still there, the imagination is still there, the gift for finding the romantic and the extraordinary in the ordinary fabric of Island life is still entirely there. But she is sixteen now, responsible for the education of the children of Avonlea, and beginning to discover that the passage from girlhood to womanhood involves a series of negotiations with the world that no amount of reading could have fully prepared her for. The neighbors are as eccentric as ever — Mr. Harrison next door is a particular trial — and the arrival of twins Davy and Dora at Green Gables introduces a new domestic chaos that tests Anne's patience, her principles, and her sense of humor in approximately equal measure. Published in 1909 as the direct sequel to Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea catches Anne in the particular sweetness of the years between — old enough to be responsible, young enough to be surprised, her character forming itself against the specific resistance of an Island community that loves her and exasperates her and shapes her in ways she will only fully understand later. Montgomery writes the Avonlea world with the same loving precision and the same luminous seasonal atmosphere that made the first novel irresistible — the apple orchards in bloom, the red roads winding between the fields, the particular quality of a Prince Edward Island summer that seems to exist at a slightly higher temperature of beauty than anywhere else on earth. Warm, funny, and suffused with the particular bittersweet quality of a life in the process of becoming what it will be — Anne of Avonlea is Montgomery at her most purely pleasurable.