By Cassandra Navratil
One of the best and arguably most memorable scenes in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is main character Anne Shirley’s tea party with her ‘kindred spirit’ and ‘bosom friend’ Diana Barry. Having read through Kallie George’s other Anne adaptations, such as Goodnight, Anne and Anne Arrives, I was eager to see how she had adapted this treasured moment for younger readers.
At first glance, the stunning illustrations by Abigail Halpin left me feeling warm and nostalgic for my own childhood, and the image of Anne with Diana on the cover was just as I imagined them countless times before. Even if readers are not familiar with Anne outside of this book, Kallie George does a magnificent job of concisely detailing how Anne came to be living at Green Gables with the Cuthberts. The voicing of each of the characters is done in such a way that is simple yet still evokes the feeling and acknowledgement that this story is not set in our modern world. Old-fashioned language and expressions are utilized throughout the story but not overdone, and I suspect that George has done this to keep even the youngest readers engaged. My five-year-old daughter found the novel delightful and expanded her own vocabulary via her curiosity about words like “kindred” and “cordial”.
After completing my first read-through, I checked against the original novel and found that some of the conversational text was exact, which I did not expect in a younger children’s adaptation. I am very excited for more of these adaptations to come from such a wonderfully talented Canadian children’s author.
Thank you, Penguin Random House, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.