Anne of Avonlea

Anne Shirley is sixteen and the new schoolmistress of Avonlea, sworn never to use the strap and tested at once by a boy who dares her. Around her the village goes on: a neighbour's cow in the wrong field, twin orphans dropped on the doorstep, a woman who has lived alone with an old love story for twenty-five years. L. M. Montgomery wrote it in a Prince Edward Island farmhouse while nursing her grandmother, and put the island's gossip in whole. The temper that got Anne into trouble in the first book is still there, and so is the tongue. Fifty-three paintings by George Clausen and Michael Ancher follow the village year, its fields and shore, matching the island life the story tells.