One of my favorite literary heroines is Anne Shirley of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. I love that book, so when I saw that it was the subject of the second installment of The Mother-Daughter Book Club
series by Heather Vogel Frederick, that was what really convinced me to
pick up the series. I loved the thought of reading a book steeped in
references to irrepressible Anne, dreamy Gilbert and picturesque
Avonlea, and once I finished the first book in the series, I knew that I
would enjoy Vogel’s story and characters just as much as the classic to
which she was paying tribute.
Much Ado About Anne
finds Emma Hawthorne, Jess Delaney, Cassidy Sloane and Megan Wong about
to embark upon their second year with the book club that their mothers
instituted. These four live in Concord, Massachusetts, an ideal setting
for a series about the way literature can help to shape a life.
Frederick makes note of all the famous authors who once lived in this
tranquil New England town. In the first book, Louisa May Alcott got the
most attention; this time around, she devotes a chapter to a field trip
to Walden Pond, which involves plenty of discussion about Henry David
Thoreau, whose passion for the environment fits in very well with the
book’s most pressing storyline.
Quiet, intellectual Jess, an
animal lover whose mother only recently returned from a stint as the
star of a soap opera filmed in New York, lives on historic Half Moon
Farm. Even stylish Megan, who is no big fan of tromping around outdoors,
agrees that there is something magical about this place. So everyone is
horrified to learn that, due to a change in tax law, the Delaneys stand
in very real danger of losing their farm. Even worse, a developer has
already expressed interest in paving over the plot of land and building
condominiums. Jess feels the same sense of deep attachment to Half Moon
Farm that Anne does to Green Gables, the beautiful home where she comes
to live with the stern Marilla and her gentle brother Matthew after they
agree to take her in, despite having requested that the orphanage send
them a boy to help with the farm work.
As with the first book in the series, Much Ado About Anne
is written in the present tense and divided into four sections - one
for each season. Once again, each section contains four chapters, each
narrated by a different member of the book club. Underneath the name of
the narrator for the chapter is a quote from either Anne of Green Gables or Anne of Avonlea; the girls read both books over the course of the year, up from just one in the first year - though admittedly, Little Women
is an especially long book. Anne’s love of language, her propensity for
getting into mischief, her knack for finding kindred spirits and her
complex relationship with the dashing Gilbert Blythe all resonate with
at least one of the girls, but it’s Montgomery’s profound sense of place
that really sets the tone of this second installment. Most people who
have read and cherished Anne of Green Gables would be disturbed
at the thought of that gorgeous estate falling into the hands of
developers, so the comparison makes Jess’s predicament seem all the more
poignant.
While Jess frets over the potential loss of her
farm, her best friend Emma joins the school newspaper, an ideal step for
an aspiring writer. Unfortunately, this brings her into even closer
contact than usual with Becca Chadwick, the Queen Bee of the mean girls
at Walden Middle School. Becca and her overbearing mother have already
invaded the book club, making it feel like less of a safe haven and more
of a war zone. In the midst of all this Chadwick saturation, Becca’s
older brother Stewart, a klutzy bookworm, becomes much more prominent,
and as she begins getting to know him, Emma is startled to find herself
wondering if her raging crush on handsome jock Zach Norton might be
fading.
Cassidy doesn’t want anything to do with all this
boy-crazy nonsense. She’s the only one of the book club girls who
doesn’t have the hots for someone, and she doesn’t intend for that to
change anytime soon. In fact, she’s downright hostile to the idea, which
may be partly because her mother, former supermodel and current host of
a cooking show shot in her home, has begun dating again. To Cassidy, a
daddy’s girl through and through, this feels like a deep betrayal of her
father, who died in a car accident two years earlier. Everything that
we see of Stanley Kincaid suggests that mild-mannered accountant is a
kind, generous man who wants to reach out to Cassidy, but she is too
hurt to be open to that possibility.
The depth of her
resentment becomes plain in the chapter in which Stanley takes her to a
Bruins game for her birthday. I have a young friend who, like Cassidy,
is a middle-schooler who plays on a local hockey team and adores the
Bruins. Recently, she got to attend a game with her family, so reading
this chapter, I felt as though I was able to experience her excitement.
Cassidy can’t help being caught up in the thrill of the game, but that
doesn’t stop her from seething when someone makes the mistake of asking
if Stanley is her dad. The quote for this chapter is the only reference
to the saddest event in Anne of Green Gables, and it’s presented
in such a way that someone who hasn’t read the book might not be able to
guess the context. It surprised me that Much Ado About Anne never mentions this moment directly, since there are several references to the death of a main character in Little Women in the first book. I wonder if someone complained about spoilers and Frederick decided to avoid that this time around?
Megan, who was so antagonistic to Emma, Jess and Cassidy at the
beginning of the series, has been fully integrated into the group, but
although she now is disgusted with Becca’s mean behavior, she doesn’t
want to totally abandon her friendship with Becca and her cronies Ashley
and Jen. After all, they have a lot of things in common with her that
the other three don’t, most notably a passion for fashion. But Becca has
been so cruel for so long that Jess, Cassidy and especially Emma have
adopted an Us and Them attitude about her and her friends, leaving Megan
is a tough spot. If she continues to hang around with them, Emma and
her friends will feel betrayed. While this is largely Jess’s story, I
find Megan the most interesting character to watch, since she is the
only one with one foot in both camps. She is in a position to do what I
had hoped the heroic Jack would do after spending a week with the Others
in season three of LOST:
use her knowledge of both groups of figure out a path to diplomacy. For
much of the first book, Megan comes across as a pretty frivolous
character, but in this book, she shows real maturity.
It may
help that as a result of a serendipitous encounter with a pair of
fashion designers during a trip to New York at the end of the previous
book, she has now been given a rare chance to follow her passion all the
way to the pages of a premiere fashion magazine. She spends all year
working on designs for the feature they intend to do on her in their new
teen magazine, and even her mother, an ardent environmentalist who
wishes Megan’s goals involved the betterment of Earth and humanity,
asserts that she is very proud of her.
Frederick has created
several wonderful characters who struggle together to overcome the
trials of middle school. Their mothers are just as richly drawn, and
it’s especially great to get to know Jess’s mother, who’s just as warm
and encouraging as the rest, since I spent much of the first book
suspecting that she would never return to Concord on a permanent basis.
These girls feel very realistic, and they certainly don’t always make
the most noble decisions. I was particularly disappointed in the girls -
sans Megan - for concocting a prank to humiliate Becca on live
television. Did she deserve it? Probably. But shame on them for stooping
to her level. As in the first book, however, the girls learn from their
mistakes, and this incident has deep repercussions driving several key
events in the book.
I’ve started in on the third volume, in
which the focus is on a book I’ve never heard of, but that doesn’t
matter to me. I’m glad that allusions to Anne led me to this series, but
Frederick has more than demonstrated that these are books that can
stand on their own merits.
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