(...Following the conclusion of our recent discussion of "The Story Girl," the LMM [L.M. Montgomery] Readathon group on Facebook I've been part of for the past two years is on hiatus. The organizers promised to keep the group going as long as the pandemic lasted... I don't think they ever imagined it going into Year #3 (we've covered seven Montgomery books to date)..! One of the organizers is stepping back due to other commitments, and if the group is to continue, volunteers will be needed. Decisions/future plans will be announced soon...)
We've since learned that the group WILL continue (yay!), but the next read has yet to be announced. My fingers are crossed that a future read (if not the very next one) will be the sequel to "The Story Girl," "The Golden Road," which was first published in 1913. While waiting to learn about the fate of the Facebook group, I decided I might as well (re)read "The Golden Road" myself, while "The Story Girl," its characters and plots, were still fresh in my mind.
First, a personal story: I actually read "The Golden Road" before "The Story Girl." Like many, I discovered Montgomery through "Anne of Green Gables," when I was about 8 years old, and read many of the Anne sequels before I turned to some of her other works. The timeline is a little fuzzy, but sometime in the early 1970s, my family took a road trip back to the two places we'd lived in Saskatchewan to visit friends. In one town where we had lived, we stayed with the retired (childless, spinster) schoolteacher who had "adopted" our young family when we'd lived there. (I wrote about her -- "Miss A." -- in this 2013 post about my "other mothers.") She knew I loved to read, and we must have discussed books, because she handed me a volume from her shelf and suggested I might want to look at it while I was there.
It was "The Golden Road" (possibly a first edition, from what I remember of the cover) -- a Montgomery book I hadn't read yet. Not only that, she said that the author was her cousin! I always thought Miss A. (like Lucy Maud Montgomery) was born in Prince Edward Island; years later, I learned she was actually born in Saskatchewan, but her parents were from there. I am not sure of the relationship, because none of the names I've uncovered from her family tree match any of the names I've heard in connection with Montgomery's genealogy. Anyway, that's how I first came to read "The Golden Road," and ahead of "The Story Girl," too. :)
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"The Golden Road" picks up almost immediately where "The Story Girl' left off, continuing the adventures of the King cousins and their friends on the family farm near the fictional town of Carlisle, Prince Edward Island, for almost another full year. Like "The Story Girl," there's not any central plot, just a string of episodes focused on the cousins' adventures and characters and family life, with some storytelling from the Story Girl thrown in for their (and our) entertainment, as well as entries from the family magazine the children write together. Peg Bowen, the local "witch," makes a couple of memorable appearances, figuring somewhat more prominently in this book than in the last, and the mystery of Jasper Dale, "the Awkward Man," is finally resolved. All the elements are skillfully woven together, and over the course of the two books, we come to know and care about these characters, as they (inevitably) face leaving the "golden road" of childhood behind them.
I won't spoil the ending, except to say that the last five or six chapters build to an emotional climax that had me reaching for kleenex.
There is part of me that thinks this book is slightly superior to "The Story Girl." But I'm giving it the same rating: 4 stars on Goodreads.
This was Book #25 read to date in 2022 (and Book #3 finished in May), bringing me to 56% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 7 books ahead of schedule. :) You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."
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