Tag Archives: L.M. Montgomery

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favorite TV Shows and Why

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

I wish this prompt had happened in January or July! I tend to watch lots of TV when the weather is freezing or unbearably hot. Spring and fall are when I cut back on shows and spend more time socializing with friends and visiting the great outdoors to soak up the mild weather.  With that being said, I will follow the prompt and talk about television instead of going off on a tangent about how much I want to go wander off into the woods for an afternoon.

These are my current favourite shows for reasons I’ll explain underneath the photo of each program.  If I were going to go out to dinner with any of you, I’d light up if you mentioned being fans of them as well.

The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t on this list because it won’t be out until later on this summer. Mindfulness is important to me, so I’m doing my best to wait until the first episode is out before getting excited about it.

Anne with an E

One of the things that always bothered me a little bit about L.M. Montgomery’s  Anne of Green Gables series was how much it brushed over Anne’s difficult childhood. She mentioned some pretty serious moments of child abuse and neglect to her new foster parents, and then the plot pretty much skipped over the trauma of those experiences for her. To be fair, these weren’t things that were discussed in too much depth in children’s books back then, and people living in the 1800s also had a much murkier understanding of how adverse childhood experiences could affect someone years later.

The cool thing about season one of this remake is that it hasn’t been afraid to explore how being abused, neglected, and abandoned by multiple caregivers had a serious emotional impact on Anne. I know some fans have criticized it for being too dark, but I think it’s going to be interesting to see how this more realistic approach to her story affects the person she becomes as she grows up.

I still need to watch season two. I’m so behind on shows!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

I love the fact that this sitcom has a diverse cast but doesn’t fall back on stereotypes in order to make their jokes or explain who their characters are. All of the main characters and even some of the secondary ones are three-dimensional individuals. They feel like real people, warts and all.  It’s amazing to see how they’ve grown and changed over the years.

The running jokes are great, too. This isn’t the sort of sitcom I’d recommend watching out of order. There were things that happened in season one that are still being brought up by the characters years later.

Stranger Things

This was the show that taught me that people used to smoke everywhere and let their kids wander all over town without any supervision at all in the 1980s! Yes, I’m mostly joking there, but I was shocked by some of the cultural differences between that era and our own.

On a more serious note, I really like fantasy stories that are set in our world and feel as ordinary as possible. If not for the various supernatural stuff going on in this setting, it could have all really happened to my parents or other relatives who were teens or young adults back then. That’s quite appealing to me.

Black Mirror

I’m brand new to this show. It’s like The Twilight Zone in the sense that each episode is its own self-contained sci-fi or fantasy story. Of the few I’ve seen so far, there doesn’t seem to be crossover between any of them as far as characters or plots go.

I love the creativity of the episodes I have seen. The writers seem to take current trends and extrapolate what they might be like at a distant point in the future or in a version of earth where, say, a parent’s desire to electronically monitor her child is taken to the logical extreme.

I know I’m being vague here, but I really don’t want to give away spoilers. Let’s just say that this is a very thought-provoking program that I’m enjoying so much that I’m even willing to come home from the park early in order to watch it.

The same can be said for the rest of these shows, too. Ha!

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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5 Stories That Need a Prequel

Last week I was scrolling through the list of new ebooks at my local library and stumbled across a title that made me grin. Marilla of Green Gables: A Novel by Sarah McCoy was written to tell the story of Marilla Cuthbert’s life before she and her brother became the permanent guardians of Anne Shirley.

As a lifelong fan of Anne of Green Gables and the many sequels to that tale, I’ve often wondered why Marilla was such a stiff and proper woman when she first met Anne. L.M. Montgomery only gave a few hints about Marilla’s childhood, and most of them were vague.

While I wait for a copy of this prequel to become available at the library, I thought it would be interesting to list some other books that would benefit from a prequel to explain things in them that their original versions never got around to describing in full detail to the audience. Some of them I’ve discussed on this site in the past, while others are brand new these types of posts.

There are mild spoilers to follow in this post for certain titles, so reader beware.

1. Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

This first book in the Earth’s Children series began with a five-year-old child named Ayla getting lost in the woods after an earthquake killed her parents about 30,000 years ago in ice-age Europe. It probably would have been unusual for parents to be travelling alone with such a young child, and it would have been unthinkable for someone so young to survive long at all in the woods by herself.

It bothered me when this series ended without any resolution for who the main character’s original people were or why her parents were travelling alone with her when they died. Based on how many different tribes she met as an adult and how small and interconnected the human population was in general in this universe, I would have expected someone to remember hearing something about a young family disappearing without a trace a decade or two before.

Well, either that or Ayla was actually the daughter of time-travelling scientists who hadn’t made contact with ancient humans at all before their untimely deaths. But if that theory is true, why would they take a child on such a dangerous trip without at least bringing a few more adults along to help look after her and gather data about what life was really like back hen?

2. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

Since Ransom Riggs is still writing and publishing new portions of this series, I hope he will eventually dive into the history of what life was like for Miss Peregrine and other Peculiars before they were forced to hide in time loops.

I’d imagine that there is a massive difference between having to relive the same day over and over again for decades to avoid being eaten by Hollowgasts (a violent monster species in this universe) and choosing to do so.

It’s hard to imagine what life was like for the Peculiars before their lives were constantly put into terrible danger. I’d like to think they had peaceful and creative existences at one point in their history.

The development of the current plot line in these books has been fantastic so far. I’d simply like to see the same attention paid to how all of this began in the first place. If that ever happens, this might become my favourite young adult series of this century.

 

3. Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill.

There are a lot of things I have to avoid saying about this book in order to avoid giving away any spoilers for it.

Freida, the main character, had spent her entire lifetime being groomed to be the perfect wife for a man she’d never met. She was raised in an environment that was very similar to a boarding school or other institutional setting. Along with her classmates, she lived, studied, exercised, and relaxed within the same four walls.

The audience quickly learned that all women in this society are raised in these school but that none of the men are. While I can’t give you any details about why this society was set up that way, I will say that I really wish we could have a prequel to this tale that explained more clearly when and how men and women were separated this way.

There was so much ground left to cover on that topic by the time I finished this novel. It could more than fill out the pages of a full-length prequel.

4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Once again, the main character of this book grew up in a boarding school sort of place that had strict

rules about what their students were allowed to do. Unlike Only Ever Yours, these characters had no idea what their fate would be when they grew up.

All they knew was that they were special for reasons their instructors never went into detail about.

Just like in the previous section of this post, I can’t go into many details about what was really happening in this universe other than to say that all of those adults weren’t feeding, educating, and protecting hundreds of children out of a sense of goodwill for our species. There were dark reasons for their actions that eventually began to come to light, but never to the degree I would have liked them to.

This was the sort of social experiment that I really thought should have been fleshed out in greater detail. If it were to actually happen in real life, there were be a lot of people who were vehemently opposed to it every step of the way.

Realistically speaking, how did the folks who created this system deal with the protestors? Did they keep it top secret, or did they find more violent ways to suppress the opposing side?

A prequel would be the perfect place to show how the idea for this school first took root and why it was allowed to continue.

5. The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist. 

Yes, I know I’ve blogged about this one before. It’s been so long since my last mention of it that I simply had to bring it up again since this is the sort of story that haunts me long after I’ve finished the final scene.

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, The Unit is about a futuristic version of America where women over the age of 50 and men over the age of 60 who haven’t met specific milestones like getting married or having children are forced to donate their organs and other tissues to people who need them. Yes, this included organs that one can’t live without like the heart.

What frightened me the most about this world was how realistic it felt. Forced organ donations are already known to be happening in certain parts of the world today. While it still feels unrealistic for it to occur in North America where this tale was set, I would have loved to know how such a system was sold to the population at large in a fictional version of the United States.

Would the general public have believed that these people were dying willingly to save strangers? Had this group of people been so dehumanized that average folks no longer thought of them as fellow human beings? I had so many questions about how this system had been sold to society in general that were never answered. A prequel would be the perfect way to finally know how and when the protagonist, Dorrit Weger, and all of the other people sent to The Unit were marked as dispensable without anyone fighting to save them.

What stories do you wish had a prequel?

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Characters I’d Invite to Thanksgiving Dinner

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers! I’m enjoying a nice, quiet Thanksgiving this year while also wondering what it would be like to celebrate this holiday with characters from some of my favourite books.

If I could, I’d sure love to share this holiday with the following people:

1. Anne Shirley from the L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series.

She’d be welcomed to bring her legal guardians, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, along as well. As someone who is almost always quiet, I’d love to listen to her chatter about whatever it was that had happened to her recently.

It would also be interesting to get more details about her life before she was adopted if she was willing to share them.Some of my favourite scenes in this series were the ones that showed how they all enriched each other’s lives.

2. Afsan from Robert J. Sawyer’s Far-Seer trilogy. 

Not only would it be cool to see what a Tyrannosaurs would want to eat for Thanksgiving, I’d love to talk to this character about his impressions of human customs in general. (His species was sentient and quite intelligent in this series). He’d almost certainly be as horrified and/or amused by some of the things we do as we would be by certain Tyrannosaurs customs.

3. Starr Carter from Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.

Starr was such an easy character to love. My sympathy for her only grew stronger after she watched a police officer kill her best friend in one of the earliest scenes of her story. I’d want to fix her a big plate of food and offer her any comfort I could over the holidays.

4. Anna from Claire Cameron’s The Bear.

Anna was a six-year-old girl whose family went on a camping trip in a remote section of a national park. After her parents were killed by a bear, she had to figure out how to get her younger brother and herself to safety.

This was one of the most intense things I’ve ever read. I wish it were possible to catch up with characters years later to see how they’re doing. She was so young when the attack happened that she didn’t understand what was going on. While I would never ask about the deaths of her parents specifically, I’d love to know what her life was like after the events of the final scene.

5.  Patricia Cowan from Jo Walton’s My Real Children

Patricia might have lived in one of two different timelines during the course of this book depending on which memories of hers you tend to believe are the genuine ones.

Not only did the course of her life take radically different turns in each timeline, the course of human history did as well. I can’t say much else without giving away spoilers, but I’d sure like to talk to this character so I could find out which version of the events she remembered actually took place.

6. Hattie Shepherd and her descendants from Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

The first chapter of this tale showed Hattie desperately attempting to save her first two children, a set of twins who were dying from pneumonia in 1923 when such a disease was much harder to treat than it is today. The rest of the storyline showed what happened to this woman and the nine other children she had after the deaths of her first two babies.

Her extended family as a whole wasn’t a particularly emotionally healthy one. I believe that Hattie would have been diagnosable if she’d lived in a time and place where seeing the doctor for mental health concerns was socially acceptable. As it was, her undiagnosed illness damaged her relationships with all of her surviving children and their families.

Sometimes dysfunctional ways of interacting with the world can be passed down for generations when people either can’t recognize the harmful patterns in their family or aren’t willing to try to change them. I’ve seen it happen both in real life and in fiction. It’s as sad as it is fascinating. I’d love to invite different combinations of people from this family to various dinners to see if I could figure out how they’ve changed over the years.

Which character would you invite to your Thanksgiving dinner?

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