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A review by justabean_reads
The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
3.0
I've never read LMM before! But since this was a book club pick, it was a nice excuse to give her a go. Since someone else picked the book, I ended up going in completely cold. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I ended up with a romance both in the modern sense of the word, and the sense of the romantic movement, or since this was in North America, perhaps Transcendentalism would be more accurate.
Our heroine is set forth in the most convincingly miserable existence in small-town Ontario some time in the 1920s, where conventionality and family judgement literally control her every waking hour, and the only beauty in her life exists in her imagination and nature books written by a Mysterious Author. Right away, we get hit with this wall of unhappiness, which was the most convincing description of being at a dead-end and out of options since Persuasion, except our heroine here doesn't even have a busted love affair to regret.
Then she goes to the doctor to ask about a touch of angina, and finds out she only has a year to live. At this point, it became incredibly easy to call all the turns, but it's not like one minds that kind of thing. I minded a little more that this was apparently LLM's ode to how much she enjoyed that one trip to Muskoka. The middle of the book is about seven straight chapters of descriptions of how pretty cottage country is, and it might have been great in 1926, but that was before Odes to Cottage Country became a genre, one that I unfortunately categorically dislike.
However, the romance was very sweet, and I like the tropes around "very unhappy person gets showered with everything she didn't know she wanted and learns to be happy." Also as a portrait of small-town ignominy, it was a lot of fun.
(Also, has anyone read The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough? Because I really came away feeling like she'd read The Blue Castle because it had a lot of reflections, though perhaps they were just playing with the same set of tropes. Oh, looked it up, and apparently there was a plagiarism accusation. Interesting.)
Our heroine is set forth in the most convincingly miserable existence in small-town Ontario some time in the 1920s, where conventionality and family judgement literally control her every waking hour, and the only beauty in her life exists in her imagination and nature books written by a Mysterious Author. Right away, we get hit with this wall of unhappiness, which was the most convincing description of being at a dead-end and out of options since Persuasion, except our heroine here doesn't even have a busted love affair to regret.
Then she goes to the doctor to ask about a touch of angina, and finds out she only has a year to live. At this point, it became incredibly easy to call all the turns, but it's not like one minds that kind of thing. I minded a little more that this was apparently LLM's ode to how much she enjoyed that one trip to Muskoka. The middle of the book is about seven straight chapters of descriptions of how pretty cottage country is, and it might have been great in 1926, but that was before Odes to Cottage Country became a genre, one that I unfortunately categorically dislike.
However, the romance was very sweet, and I like the tropes around "very unhappy person gets showered with everything she didn't know she wanted and learns to be happy." Also as a portrait of small-town ignominy, it was a lot of fun.
(Also, has anyone read The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough? Because I really came away feeling like she'd read The Blue Castle because it had a lot of reflections, though perhaps they were just playing with the same set of tropes. Oh, looked it up, and apparently there was a plagiarism accusation. Interesting.)