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emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective medium-paced
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes

I so badly wanted this book to be like Anne of Green Gables, but it fell short for me. There were some enjoyable parts, though not enough for me to rate it higher. I did love every chapter where Emily wrote letters to her decieced father. I also absolutely loved Fr. Cassidy. The girls were straight up mean to each other, which I didn't like. Dean Priest’s relationship with Emily made me uncomfortable. I understand that at the time, the age of consent was 14, but still a 36 year old should not be talking with a 12 year old the way he does. Specifically the “I’ll wait” comment.

This book is very much the ‘through the looking glass darkly’ version of Anne of Green Gables. I saw in another review someone saying that this is the realistic version of what would’ve happened to Anne, not the optimistic one and I think I’d agree. 

The Anne books are full of heart ache, and grief, and childish mistakes and difficult decisions but at the end of the day, the undercurrent is always one of love and hope and finding acceptance. Emily has none of that, and most of the time I wanted to wrap her in my arms and protect her from literally everyone apart from her three friends and Jimmy. Elizabeth is cruel to a grieving child, Laura is sweet but never stands up for her, her dead father is spoken ill of repeatedly, her dead mother is never mentioned, she is literally groomed by an adult, and her dreams and interests are shunned at every turn by the adults who are meant to be looking after her. 

Emily literally ends this book “a little taller, a little thinner, a little less childlike, with great, grey shadowy eyes that had looked into death and read the riddle of a buried thing and henceforth would hold in them some haunting, elusive remembrance of that world behind the veil” which I think sums this book up. 

I’m not sure that I’ll bother to get the next two despite my love for LM Montgomery’s writing and my love of Emily herself. I feel… weird and disillusioned after reading this, and I wonder if the chronological timeline of this book in LM Montgomery’s life makes it a reflection of her own disillusionment with life too?

This series used to be one of my favourite books in my early years - I still have the hardcover set in Latvian, which I picked up in a book sale more than 15 years ago and which incidentally was one of the first book purchases I made on my own.

I've read and re-read it numerous times and now reading it as an adult, I'm still completely and utterly enamoured by it. It's also my first time reading it in English and I've come to believe that quite a lot has been lost in translation.
adventurous lighthearted medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
hopeful lighthearted slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Emily is a slow story about the life an orphaned girl in Victorian Canada, and it just doesn’t have the comedy and drama that the Anne books do. There are moments of excitement, and a handful of LOL moments, but it’s rather mundane otherwise. 

Really loved this even more than I did as a child.

Rereading this as an adult, after 30+ years since my first reading. I love Montgomery’s writing, as always. However, I was really struck reading this how much I missed as a child. While the Anne books create a world that is mostly without darkness, in Emily felt like there is more reality. A hint at the trauma of being an orphan, the stern way children were treated, the societal faults of the era it takes place in. Maybe this is the vein of Montgomery’s own story that comes through.

I wish I could live in L.M. Montomgery's nature descriptions instead of this capitalist hellscape.

It took me a while to get into, but I’m glad I stuck with it, and I’m looking forward to the ones after this. Funny little phrases sprinkled throughout gave me some good laughs. It’s very much like Anne of Green Gables and same author, so I do find it confusing that she’s writing a very similar storyline to the Anne series. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it.