Book #82: Emily's Quest by L. M. Montgomery

This was the third and final Emily book, and you guessed it--I finished it the same day I finished the second. I couldn't wait to find out what happened to Emily, I guess. But this book ended up being my least favorite of the three, possibly because it was mostly focused on Emily's love life and it was really very unsatisfying. The best things about the other books--her relationships with her friends and her escapades and adventures--really didn't show up in this book. In this book, Emily's friends all move on to other places and go to further schooling (like in Montreal) and she's left as the only one in their town of Blair Water, where she's chosen to stay and write from her home instead of taking an amazing job offer in New York. She doesn't regret that decision, but she does miss her friends and feel left out. Montgomery shows Emily and her friends moving apart, in a world where the only form of communication is letters, and they can't come home to visit for years at a time, and I kind of hated how they grew apart and distant, because I really loved their little group in the first book. Emily does become really successful with her writing (which is, I suppose, the Quest in the title) and publishes her first book throughout the story (and by the very end has published more), and makes her own substantial living from writing, but honestly, her writing seems kind of secondary to the romances of the story.

Here's the gist of that: Emily has basically always been in love with her neighbor Teddy Kent, but she has always been too proud to say anything and never will give him any sign that she likes him. So basically, this whole book is years of Emily pining away for Teddy and then these chance encounters that they have where they are both too proud to say what they're really thinking and afraid to confess their love for each other. So they both eventually get engaged to other people, then eventually break them off (blah blah blah), and then years (and years) pass and Emily and Teddy finally get together three pages before the end of the book. I felt like so much of this nonsense could have been prevented if one of them would have been a little more straightforward and grown-up about this, and although I wanted them to end up together they were both so stupid about it. Teddy is basically a non-character in the story--we hardly know anything about him except that he is a good artist--but you still like him enough because Emily does.

Overall, I had to read this because I had to know what happens to Emily, but I was more frustrated over this book than I was over the other two, probably because I just wanted Emily to be happy and stop keeping her love at arm's length.