Book #81: Emily Climbs by L. M. Montgomery

After reading Emily of New Moon, I ended up starting (and almost finishing) the second book in the trilogy that same night. I was really interested to learn about what was going to happen for Emily! In this second book, similar to Anne's progression to Queens Academy, Emily goes to Shrewsbery High School and continues her writing. She moves in with another severe older aunt, who is even worse than the original ones she was living with, and has clashes with her and gets into scrapes with her friends. She has romantic intrigues and boys proposing to her, but she remains aloof and secretly in love with her childhood friend Teddy Kent (which doesn't really become that much of a plot point until the next book).

This book reminded me a lot of Anne of Avonlea or whatever the third book is in the Anne series. It's a very similar coming-of-age series, so that connection has to keep coming up. Montgomery's style is so effusive and focused on the joys of nature and the beauty of life, coming from both Anne and Emily, that I can't help imagining that Prince Edward Island to be the most beautiful, amazing place on earth. I really and truly would love to go there--we WILL go there someday, maybe for an anniversary trip or something. But reading this book made me a little bit sad that we live in such an ugly, ugly place, and that I didn't grow up in or live in a place with a lot of nature. I don't even know if such idyllic, romantic places like Montgomery describes even exist any more, but I know they aren't here in Frisco. Anywhere. I was feeling very nature-deprived today so I took Dane to the nature preserve/museum this morning to get us outside (and it was so hot we were tired of it after about an hour).

SO, after that tangent, I did love this book and Emily's development and self-realizations throughout it. I love how she decided in the first book that she was going to become a famous author, and she just set herself to work, ALWAYS, always writing and practicing and developing, and then in this book she actually starts to do it. She begins working at the local newspaper, she writes a lot for school stuff, she begins sending her poems and stories off to magazines for publication (and gets lots of rejections but then the acceptances come). I don't necessarily think that this sort of path would be so easily followed today (or maybe it would be? In a world of blogs and internet magazines and journals?) but Emily set her goal and then worked really hard to achieve it, and I loved that.