Project Gutenberg of Australia e-book, 195 pages, 1926
I kind of hate these covers for L.M. Montgomery's books (the edition of Anne of the Island I read as a kid had a similar one), and because I read it as a Project Gutenberg e-book it doesn't technically have a cover, but I use it anyway to show how fluffy the book was. And yet so good. L.M. Montgomery (in case you don't recognize the name) is the author of the Anne of Green Gables books, which I totally love, I don't care what anyone says. The Blue Castle is one of her only novels written for adults. I actually hated Anne's House of Dreams (one of the later Anne stories where Anne is grown up and married to her childhood sweetheart), and between that and the depressing tone of the first few chapters I thought The Blue Castle would be a disappointment, but I ended up loving it! I thought it would just be a straightforward romance, but most of the book deals with the heroine's rebellion against her stifling family and the social mores of the time. After telling everyone off in a couple of fantastic scenes, she moves out, gets a job as a housekeeper for the town drunk (who turns out to be a pretty good guy), befriends an unwed mother with consumption, and asks a man to marry her (remember, this is rural Canada in 1926). The thing I hated about Anne's House of Dreams is that after all the romantic buildup of the first three novels, once Anne and Gilbert are married they apparently never interact with each other again, because women stay home and have babies while the men go out and work, don't you know. (That, and the story revolves around some "tragic" characters who are everything the first two books poked fun at.) But the relationship between Valancy and Barney is sweet and realistic precisely because it starts out unromantically; they're more like companions than lovers, and because there are no expectations they're free to live the way they want, which involves lots of walks in the forest and hanging out at home (Barney is also a shady character who doesn't seem to have a job of any kind). Of course they really do fall in love in the end and Barney turns out to be a millionaire and everyone lives happily ever after, but it's a really charming story and only a little bit cliche. This really makes me want to read more of L.M. Montgomery's work, particularly the Emily of New Moon series.
Up next: A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
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