Note: Jane at Greenish Bookshelf and Jackie at Death By Tsundoku are co-hosting an Anne of Green Gables series readalong for the remainder of the year. Check out their blogs for more info on how to join the fun!
“Gilbert darling, don’t let’s ever be afraid of things. It’s such dreadful slavery. Let’s be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let’s dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!”
Ah, the power of low expectations! I’d been warned by Melanie that the even-numbered books in this series weren’t as good as the odd ones. Plus, my own experience with the second book made me set my bar pretty low for Anne of Windy Poplars. How nice to be surprised! I ended up really enjoying this and felt almost sad when I finished it.
Windy Poplars introduces a new kind of structure to the series, with many of the chapters in the form of letters from Anne to her beloved Gilbert Blythe. I confess that when I read the first chapter I thought, “Dude, this chapter is too long to be an actual letter to someone!” But then I just went with it and forgot about my minor quibble. Anne tells Gilbert early on that he’ll only get a romantic letter from her when she has exactly the right kind of pen. I am most grateful that we are spared the lovey-dovey stuff between Anne and Gilbert. Call me a crank, go ahead! This book is about Anne and her last years of being an independent, single young lady. I can read all about shmoopy-ness in the next book (or so I hear!)
I didn’t know if I could take all the ridiculous Pringle business at first. In fact, as I took notes during my reading I labeled two people “pills” and two others names that I won’t print here out of decency. 🙂 But Anne worked her innumerable charms (and wasn’t above a little innocent suggested blackmail) and turned around all the unfriendly and hostile Pringles and others in Summerside. Two of my favorite victories of Anne’s were when she sat with the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Gibson, allowing Pauline to go to her friend’s wedding and enjoy a glorious day of freedom, and the matchmaking of Nora and Jim Wilcox.
I actually shed some tears when I read about poor Teddy Armstrong. I could tear up just thinking about it now, his poor father all alone without a picture of his beloved little boy. Finding his nephew Lewis brought some measure of peace but still it was a very sad event, the saddest so far in the series.
I very much enjoyed Anne’s hosts, Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, and their no-nonsense housekeeper Rebecca Dew. Rebecca’s funniest moment was when she grumbled, “Do you s’pose they’ll ask us at the judgement day how many petticoats we’ve got on?” and then went into the kitchen before anyone could comment.
I was left with a sense of melancholy when I finished the book, because I realized that this was the last installment before Anne and Gilbert get married. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for their marriage. It’s just that Anne is such an independent, strong, resourceful young woman in a time when most young women didn’t dare have dreams or independent lives beyond the hope of marriage and children. Maybe I’m anxious because I’ve never read the series before and I just don’t know that Anne will retain her strong nature and not just become a mother to little “Davy and Dora”-type kids. I want Anne to continue to solve problems and bring people together and charm people into doing what she wants! Maybe those of you who have read this series before can soothe my fears on that score.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by Windy Poplars and would definitely consider reading it again someday. The epistolary nature grew on me, as did Anne’s (sometimes unlikely) propensity for matchmaking and solving people’s problems. Four stars.
(This is book #13 of #20BooksofSummer.)
Now that I’ve had some caffeine and made myself sit down in front of my computer, let me tell you about Books 10 and 11 from my 20 Books of Summer List. (Actually, Book 11 wasn’t on either of my lists, so shhhh! Don’t tell anybody!) Book 10 is 
Book 11 is 
Set in the drought-stricken small farming town of Kiewarra, the book opens with gruesome descriptions of blowflies not discriminating between a carcass and a corpse. Something truly horrific has happened. Aaron Falk is reluctantly back in his hometown, a town he and his father were driven away from twenty years earlier. He is there to attend the funeral of his high school friend Luke. Everyone thinks that the drought and money problems made Luke snap and kill himself, his wife, and their young son. Baby Charlotte was the only survivor, because as Falk grimly observes, “thirteen-month-old don’t make good witnesses.” Luke’s parents, a second family to Aaron when he was younger, want him to quietly look into the investigation, despite Aaron’s protests that he works on the financial side of police work now. Falk agrees to stay in Kiewarra for a few days and look over their accounts, partly out of a sense of guilt about something that happened when he and Luke were teenagers.
This is one that’s been on my TBR forever. I am a big fan of Ann Patchett, especially 
Man, this series is hard to write about without revealing major plot points. 
My aunt is the one who started me on Agatha Christie. She gave me an anthology with five Hercule Poirot novels in one (Death on the Nile, Murder On the Orient Express, The ABC Murders, Cards on the Table, and Thirteen at Dinner) when I was about 12 or 13. I read The ABC Murders first and I was hooked. I fell in love with the way Christie constructed her puzzles and the way Poirot assembled all the clues to solve the murders. I loved Poirot’s rather healthy self-esteem and his friend Hasting’s amusement at him. Even back then I wasn’t one to binge-read an author, though, so I didn’t make it a point to read every Christie. I’d read one here and there throughout the years, which is why it’s taken me until now, some 28 years later, to read the very first Poirot mystery published, 
Cavendish explains to Hastings that his stepmother, Mrs. Cavendish, who raised him and his brother Lawrence from the time they were young, has recently remarried. Hastings is taken aback – a quick mental calculation tallies her age at about seventy (gasp!) John explains that everyone in the family, and even Mrs. Cavendish’s stalwart “factotum, companion, Jack of all trades” Evie Howard, disdains the marriage and the new husband, and thinks it’s nothing but a money grab. We are also told that both Cavendish brothers are hard up for money, even though their stepmother has always been generous to them through the years. So immediately the reader is alerted that there is much tension in the house at Styles, and we are invited to dislike Mr. Inglethorp, “the rotten little bounder,” even before we meet him. Christie ends the first chapter with a delicious bit of foreboding spookiness:
Told from multiple perspectives, including the type-written pages of Nel’s manuscripts, this mystery was layered with secret upon secret. It seemed every person in the town had a grudge against Nel, even her own estranged sister, Jules. It’s Jules’s perspective that we get the most of, and we see the sisters’ complicated history in flashbacks. Her grief is overshadowed by something she thinks Nel played a part in when she was thirteen and Nel was seventeen, something Jules has never recovered from emotionally.
With so many suspects and secrets I admit I didn’t know the identity of the murderer until the very end of the book. It wasn’t a shock so much as a “Yes! That makes sense!” feeling. It was a satisfying ending for me, considering all the plot elements swirling through its pages. I would say that this book was not about the “big twist” or the surprise ending as so many contemporary thrillers are. Instead, it’s a book about the complexity and unreliability of memory, and the ways in which “troublesome” women have been dealt with over time. So my second book for 20 Books of Summer was a hit! I was pleasantly surprised by how much I like this, and I will definitely be putting Ms. Hawkins’s next book on my TBR. If you plan to read it, know that it’s pretty different from her first book; for me, that was a good thing.