The Story Girl

A summer on Prince Edward Island in which the children of one orchard tell each other every story they know — the ghost bell, the blue chest that has stayed locked for fifty years, the judgement day that is announced in a newspaper. Montgomery said this was her own favourite of her books. The framing is slight and deliberate: the point is the telling, and the Story Girl's voice is the thing the others cannot copy. Forty-seven plates, among them Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt, gather children, orchards, and farm work from 1821 to 1928, matching the book's own world of young tellers and long summer days.