(minor spoilers follow)
Jane and her mother live in Toronto with her grandmother, who loves her mother but bullies Jane. She has always believed that her father is dead, so she is shocked to find that he is in fact alive and living in Prince Edward Island, and that he wants her to spend the summer with him. Jane goes determined to hate him, but instead she spends a glorious summer keeping house for her father and making friends with the locals. As time passes, both during and after the summer, Jane finds she has much to learn about herself and about life. She also tries to learn about the reasons for her parents' separation, and dreams that perhaps one day they might all be able to live together...
I liked Jane. She is perhaps more ordinary than most of Montgomery's
heroines; although she is still imaginative, she's not in the same class
as Anne or Emily. However, this doesn't stop her from having plenty of
good qualities; she is caring, brave, and determined. Although at the
start of the story she is rather awkward and lacking in confidence, as
the story goes on she learns to become more confident and to stand up
for herself more. She also develops a strong understanding of other
people; she can see her parents much more clearly than they can see each
other. The other characters are also very well-drawn, and realistic. I
liked the story too. It's a gentle, character-driven story, which is my
favourite kind, really. The writing is lovely and descriptive (of
course).
There isn't anything that I strongly disliked about it, though there
were some parts that I found hard to believe, like how quickly Jane
learns to cook and garden, with no prior experience or training. She's
supposed to have a natural gift for it, but I don't believe anyone could
really learn that quickly, especially at the age of eleven. I also
would have liked to spend more time with Jane's friends and neighbours
at Lantern Hill; there were quite a lot of them, and there wasn't really
time to get to know most of them in the time we spent there. Some of
the parts where Jane's grandmother is being particularly awful were a
little uncomfortable to read, and I'd really rather be reading about
Lantern Hill. But that isn't necessarily a criticism of the story.
Two themes stood out to me as I was reading. One is that of jealousy, of
selfish love. We are told that Jane's grandmother loves her mother, but
it is a selfish love; she can't bear for anyone else, even Jane, to
share in her mother's affections. Both of Jane's parents, too, have a
tendency to be jealous, to want to be the exclusive focus of each
other's attentions. The other theme was that of home. Jane longs for a
proper home; she wants to be away from her grandmother, of course, but
she also hates the house they live in. When she and her father are
looking for a house in Lantern Hill, it has to be just right, to possess
a little "magic". The people in the house matter, but the house itself
matters too.
Overall, I thought this was a very good book, which deserves to be better known. It's a shame Montgomery never finished the sequel, because I would have liked to have spent more time with Jane and her friends.
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