the_story_girl epitome of incomprehensibility Time for this book by L. M. Montgomery, I decided yesterday. The hardcover held nostalgia and funny dialogue - some of her best children's dialogue, maybe - but I didn't find it as page-turning as Anne_of_Green_Gables or Emily_of_New_Moon. Maybe her books need to be Proper Noun of Adjective Noun for them to have a strong narrative arc? This one felt more episodic, which wasn't awful, but maybe I prefer more momentum. Then again, maybe that style made it more adaptable for TV. Road to Avonlea was the show, confusingly named because a collection of Montgomery's short stories was also published under that title. Speaking of stories. There's a story Sarah Polley told: while recovering from surgery as a teenager, she heard one of the medical staff ask another if she was in Road to Avonlea. Grumpy, still-sedated Sarah said something like, "Yeah, but it's a shitty show." They told her afterwards, evidently amused, and she had no memory of this. If I'm not getting it exactly right, you can find the episode in Polley's book Run Towards the Danger. "Episode." Is everything an episode? An instance. A scene. A slice of memory or imagination. Sara Stanley is good at breathing life into these. She's the one called The Story Girl, the oldest of a group of cousins and assorted friends who live for a year in the same neighbourhood. Unlike many of Mongomery's other books, this one has a first-person narrator and it's a boy. Congratulations, it's a boy! Or rather a man reminiscing. A man who feels comfortable enough in his masculinity to cloak the scenes of his youth in sometimes flowery descriptions, particularly when he talks about Sara's storytelling abilities. Does he have a crush on Sara or just admire her craft? Vibes of My Antonia, or a less violent Foxfire: the narrator isn't the focal character, but fixated on someone they admire. Maybe fixated is too fixed a word. I mean, things tend to revolve around The Story Girl, not Beverley (the name was probably more masculine then - no one remarks on it). I haven't finished my reread, but one memorable scene is when the kids are worried it's going to be Judgment Day because of a newspaper article. 250618 ... ovenbird Sarah Polley's book Run Towards the Danger was one of my top reads a year or two ago. Also, I was OBSESSED with Road to Avonlea as a child. Also loved the Anne of Green Gables books. 250618 ... raze i used to see episodes of "emily of new moon" and "road to avonlea" on tv all the time years ago, and yet for some reason i never watched either one of them. not even once. but now you're both reminding me that i really need to read "run towards the danger". someday, when my brain and circumstances allow me to read books like a normal person again, i aim to make that happen. 250619 ... e_o_i It's really good, but I haven't finished it. The Sarah Polley book, I mean. (I also have a rather scattered approach to reading, my mind being what it is, but I think this is a book you can put aside for a while and pick up again since the chapters are mostly self-contained.) I *did* finish The Story Girl, and today I finished its sequel, The_Golden_Road. My belated editing advice? Combine both books into one and shorten them a little. But I enjoyed both. (I don't know why I wrote "belated." It's not like I had a chance to be born decades earlier and publish Montgomery's books...unless some past lives are hidden from my memory, only accessible as dream_jobs and so on. You could make a story out of that.) 250821 what's it to you? who go blather from