A review by pixie_d
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery

3.0

More weird stuff, including children wandering all over the countryside unsupervised; overweaning snobbishness (and implied classism/racism); a girl with an undiscussed/undiagnosed mental disorder who rages to the point of throwing and breaking cases in the principle's office -- she also smugly slaps a girl whose crime was being "ugly when she cries" -- and yet this friend of Emily's gets fully praised and never condemned for any of her violent episodes (remember that this was roughly the Leopold and Loeb era where some people thought they were above the law, because they thought they were so much better than other people -- so much unearned privilege and immense self-regard); an almost-40-yr-old asking a 14-yr-old if she is ready for romance lessons, and the girl saying she thought he was going to kiss her as if that is acceptable (oh, and he gives her a necklace that was stolen from the tomb of an Egyptian princess, as if that's just wonderful. If the British Museum is being held to task for all its cultural thefts, you can't ignore that here, either. Again, not a book to hand over to your kid without ensuing discussions); that 14-yr-old holding down jobs as if they are the kind of thing anyone would employ a child for; etc. etc. etc. It does a nice job as a career-oriented bildungsroman for an aspiring writer, however, even though you get the sense you would not like these people in person. There seems to be a huge ego at work.
The main character also has psychic episodes that rescue people, one big incident per book. When I read someone describing Emily as "the goth version of Anne of Green Gables," at first I could not see it, other than her paleness and black hair, but now I wonder if they also meant the "second sight" episodes.