feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2012-03-26 09:05 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2012-03-26 09:05 pm
REVIEW: Rainbow Valley
Rainbow Valley: L.M. Montgomery Harrap 1956
A few years ago, I bought Rilla of Ingleside in the mistaken, belief that I was completing my collection of Anne books. (I see that I didn't review it). Of course, I eventually realised that I didn’t own this but came across this hardback in my travels, although the illustration on the dustjacket gives away the ending, rather and is misleading in a way.
For, to my surprise, this story isn’t about the Ingleside children so much as it is the Merediths, the motherless children of the new Presbyterian Minister at Glen St. Mary. There are four of them, two boys and two girls, and it is the two girls, spunky Faith and sweet Una, that Montgomery is chiefly concerned with. Rainbow Valley is a name that Walter Blythe gave to the place where they and the elder Blythes have claimed as their own. Their other playmate is one Mary Vance, a ‘home girl’ like Anne herself was, but cut from different cloth. The confabs between Anne, and the indefatigable Susan and Miss Cornelia also have their due for Miss Cornelia (aka Mrs Marshall Elliot) is rather concerned by the Merediths. Their father is an excellent preacher, but somewhat impractical. He is helped out by an elderly relative who cannot see very well, cannot cook very well or manage the manse, let alone the children. Anne and her children claim them as fellow members of the tribe of Joseph, but they're high-spirited and impulsive, especially Faith, lacking the presence of an adult to check them from doing things that affront the respectable community, although, in their defence, they nearly always mean well.
Their father chances upon Rosemary West (one of those poor characters you come across in older books who share a name with someone who became infamous), a woman who can wake him up out of his abstraction and a woman who you know could help prevent the children from scandalising Elders, their wives, visiting preachers and those people Faith rightly terms gossips. And save them from their extreme attempts to punish themselves for doing so. But due to a promise to a relative that Emily’s Teddy’s mother would understand, Rosemary can't accept his proposal and spends a miserable few months because of it (I was very huffy that the instigator of this promise had a sense of humour. How dare she!)
As ever with Montgomery you get rapture over nature (greens are emeralds, twilight is mystical and the collective noun for lilies is ‘a sisterhood’) and hilarious incidents – Faith’s attempts to correct general opinion where she naively adds some home truths about adult hypocrisy. If you look for it, there’s a lot of talk of mental ill health throughout the book; there’s also foreshadowing for the First World War during which Rilla of Ingleside is set and which these youngsters will face. There are also very definite expectations of what boys do and what girls do (although I was shocked and disappointed that Gilbert Blythe abdicated the responsibility for disciplinging/punishing his son, possibly for riding on the back of a pig at Faith’s instigation, to his wife even though Anne admitted she'd find it difficult to keep a straight face.) It’s certainly readable, although I suppose I’d have sighed over it more, much as I did with the earlier Anne books, if I’d been close to Faith and Una’s age (than Rosemary’s) when reading it.
A few years ago, I bought Rilla of Ingleside in the mistaken, belief that I was completing my collection of Anne books. (I see that I didn't review it). Of course, I eventually realised that I didn’t own this but came across this hardback in my travels, although the illustration on the dustjacket gives away the ending, rather and is misleading in a way.
For, to my surprise, this story isn’t about the Ingleside children so much as it is the Merediths, the motherless children of the new Presbyterian Minister at Glen St. Mary. There are four of them, two boys and two girls, and it is the two girls, spunky Faith and sweet Una, that Montgomery is chiefly concerned with. Rainbow Valley is a name that Walter Blythe gave to the place where they and the elder Blythes have claimed as their own. Their other playmate is one Mary Vance, a ‘home girl’ like Anne herself was, but cut from different cloth. The confabs between Anne, and the indefatigable Susan and Miss Cornelia also have their due for Miss Cornelia (aka Mrs Marshall Elliot) is rather concerned by the Merediths. Their father is an excellent preacher, but somewhat impractical. He is helped out by an elderly relative who cannot see very well, cannot cook very well or manage the manse, let alone the children. Anne and her children claim them as fellow members of the tribe of Joseph, but they're high-spirited and impulsive, especially Faith, lacking the presence of an adult to check them from doing things that affront the respectable community, although, in their defence, they nearly always mean well.
Their father chances upon Rosemary West (one of those poor characters you come across in older books who share a name with someone who became infamous), a woman who can wake him up out of his abstraction and a woman who you know could help prevent the children from scandalising Elders, their wives, visiting preachers and those people Faith rightly terms gossips. And save them from their extreme attempts to punish themselves for doing so. But due to a promise to a relative that Emily’s Teddy’s mother would understand, Rosemary can't accept his proposal and spends a miserable few months because of it (I was very huffy that the instigator of this promise had a sense of humour. How dare she!)
As ever with Montgomery you get rapture over nature (greens are emeralds, twilight is mystical and the collective noun for lilies is ‘a sisterhood’) and hilarious incidents – Faith’s attempts to correct general opinion where she naively adds some home truths about adult hypocrisy. If you look for it, there’s a lot of talk of mental ill health throughout the book; there’s also foreshadowing for the First World War during which Rilla of Ingleside is set and which these youngsters will face. There are also very definite expectations of what boys do and what girls do (although I was shocked and disappointed that Gilbert Blythe abdicated the responsibility for disciplinging/punishing his son, possibly for riding on the back of a pig at Faith’s instigation, to his wife even though Anne admitted she'd find it difficult to keep a straight face.) It’s certainly readable, although I suppose I’d have sighed over it more, much as I did with the earlier Anne books, if I’d been close to Faith and Una’s age (than Rosemary’s) when reading it.