Book Review: Further Chronicles of Avonlea

[osprey_archer]

I am sorry to inform you that Further Chronicles of Avonlea was not worth the wait. Like Chronicles of Avonlea, it’s a collection of short stories, and also like Chronicles of Avonlea, they’re pretty clearly mostly stories that weren’t originally written to have an Avonlea connection.

In Chronicles of Avonlea, however, Montgomery gave it a good college try to tie the stories into the Anne of Green Gables series, with frequent cameos by Anne and friends. In Further Chronicles of Avonlea, she seems to have given up trying. There’s one story told by Anne Shirley (in first person POV, which is discombobulating; she really doesn’t feel Anne-like to me), plus a couple of brief mentions of her, but otherwise the Avonlea connection is often extremely tenuous.

This wouldn’t matter so much if the stories were stronger, but unfortunately on the whole I found them pretty weak: forgettable, or memorable for the wrong reasons, like the story about the man whose sweetheart married his best friend… and they have a daughter together… and when the daughter is ten, the best friend dies, so the man decides to take charge of the daughter’s education…

“Don’t marry your sweetheart’s daughter,” I begged.

Reader, he marries her.

This is the price of doing a complete read-through of an author’s works. Some of them are less well known for very good reason, as it turns out. Ah well. Onward and upward! Up next is Rilla of Ingleside.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Let me know what you find out. Interesting to be named after your own self-insert character!

[asakiyume]

So she was given the name, but she was given it before she even finished writing it. (She was sharing around chapters as she went.) Furthermore, there's no other name by which she's known--no pre-Murasaki moniker.

So she probably *wasn't* doing a self insert. *sigh* However, the Murasaki character is definitely seen as Best Girl and Great Wife, and is the wife Geni loves best. So what we have in her is good insight into what Murasaki thought was a great woman (and, uhhh... an okay relationship? But then there's the fact that she has Tamakazura going "Ew, NO. Gross! Get me outta here"--so maybe she could see many sides to the whole thing!) She's really great on all kinds of women (and men, for that matter). I loved Suetsumuhana, a really gawky, old-fashioned young woman whose koto playing Genji likes... but then he sees her and is like oh-boy. But she's living in straitened circumstances, and so he takes it upon himself to take care of her with all his other wives (I didn't read the whole thing, just excerpts, but I know the overall events and dramatis personae pretty well.)

[osprey_archer]

Awww, it's too bad she wasn't a self-insert. But it's fascinating to learn a little bit more about the novel and the way that Murasaki was writing it - passing around chapters as she went, like a fanfic WIP!