![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What I have been reading wednesday
Feb. 7th, 2018 01:10 pmRilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery. This was always my favourite, apart from Anne of Green Gables, and the only one I’ve reread as an adult, though it was some time ago. Rilla is Anne’s youngest child, and the book starts when she is fifteen, just before WWI starts. What I find interesting is that Rilla isn’t an exceptional girl, like her mother, and countless other heroines. She’s a very normal teenager, a bit spoiled, not interested in intellectual pursuits, rather vain and mainly concerned with her looks and having fun. She’s a nice person, but also quite ordinary. And this is what makes the book so interesting. Because at the eve of her first ball the war breaks out, and her whole world is turned upside down. The book spans four years, and we follow Rilla as she grows up; she starts to take responsibility for her life. She takes care of a war orphan, organize, skillfully, a youth Red Cross society, as well as a number of tasks she had never imagined. And though she still has no intellectual interests at the end, unlike the rest of her family, she has still evolved into a intelligent and capable woman.
I also very much enjoy Rilla’s relationship with her favourite brother Walter. She worships him, but at the start of the book she feels he only sees her as a baby sister, not as someone he can truly talk to. My sister is six years younger than me, and I remember how great it was when she grow older and we became friends, not just sisters. Of course, the book also makes me cry several times over. Especially when it comes to Dog Monday. I didn’t cared much for the token love story. Even if Ken Ford is someone Rilla has known all her life, we, the readers, haven’t, and to me the love story feel rushed and underdeveloped. In their two scenes together before Ken goes to war, Rilla is shy and tongue-tied, and though we see her through Ken’s eyes, he is only thinking over how beautiful she is, not how she is as a person. I guess they get to know each others in the letters they exchange, but basically the whole thing feels like something that is there because there “has” to be a love story. It has nothing to do with Rilla’s process of becoming an adult.
I also very much enjoy Rilla’s relationship with her favourite brother Walter. She worships him, but at the start of the book she feels he only sees her as a baby sister, not as someone he can truly talk to. My sister is six years younger than me, and I remember how great it was when she grow older and we became friends, not just sisters. Of course, the book also makes me cry several times over. Especially when it comes to Dog Monday. I didn’t cared much for the token love story. Even if Ken Ford is someone Rilla has known all her life, we, the readers, haven’t, and to me the love story feel rushed and underdeveloped. In their two scenes together before Ken goes to war, Rilla is shy and tongue-tied, and though we see her through Ken’s eyes, he is only thinking over how beautiful she is, not how she is as a person. I guess they get to know each others in the letters they exchange, but basically the whole thing feels like something that is there because there “has” to be a love story. It has nothing to do with Rilla’s process of becoming an adult.
