Emily of New Moon by l.m. montgomery

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

"It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside - but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse - and heard a note of unearthly music."

*relates*

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VictoriaLoves

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I read this for my LitLife Podcast challenge 2 for 2022 - favorite book by a favorite author. Somewhere I found that Madeleine L'Engle - my favorite author - loved Emily of New Moon and so I added it to the list.

By chapter 2 I was completely convinced that was true.

Emily could've been Madeleine's childhood (creepy older cousin notwithstanding). Stories and poetry flowing out of her; a love for words, letters, ideas, fairy; a sick and soon deceased father; misunderstood by teachers and schoolfellows (but the few); living a backward and old-fashioned life (in Switzerland for L'Engle) ... I can see how Montgomery's insistence that the father's God of Love was a foundational idea for L'Engle (between LM Montgomery and George MacDonald, no wonder L'Engle's theology is so often conceived as Universalistic)

I very much enjoyed listening to this story. I loved Anne as a young person and can see why many love Emily more - I did until the creepy cousin shows up. She views the world as one might wish one did. I don't know if I'll read more Emily books or not, but I'm glad to have listened to this one.

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jsgallagher0

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

My heart overflows with love for this book. I completely understand the love and admiration so many people have for the characters and author of this series!

I read “Jane of Lantern Hill” back in April and May of this year. I really enjoyed it and became determined to read more by Mrs. Montgomery. It was a little ridiculous how long it took me to choose between all the book options available. (Color me impressed that she wrote so many novels throughout her life.) Being in a reading funk didn’t help either... I heard somewhere that Emily is more biographical a character than her others, which made me want to read this series. Will definitely read a biography on her in the future.

This book was delightful! It completely got me out of the reading funk I was in. I'd read books that were really good but I was feeling like I just didn't want to read for some reason. The characters all come alive and are memorable in their own ways. What’s interesting is how Mrs. Montgomery showcased the faults and strengths that each character has. She gives you hope they’ll change their faults but realistic knowledge that they might not. I will forever be sad that these characters don’t exist AND that I will never meet them.

EVERYONE should read L.M. Montgomery sometime in their life. I’m reading her later in life (in my 20s) but I can see myself rereading this series throughout my life. Highly recommend for those wanting a nice middle grade read that has a mix of fun and sadness of situations that many people can relate to like death of a loved one, loss of friendship, finding a BFF, being the new kid, ect.

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amano2203

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Such a beautiful story! I really savored this one. As a child I read the Anne series but somehow I missed this little gem which is just the same sort of warm and fuzzy goodness! They don't make stories like this anymore.

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pufgil

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I just finished re-reading this book and I have to say that it is probably my favorite book of all time! I read it first at age 14 and was absolutely enthralled by it, and reading it today exactly 8 years later, I enjoyed it just as much! Not every author can craft such a story that can appeal to all ages. It's a lovely story, so beautifully written and reminds me why I love L. M. Montgomery so much. She takes time to write about the seemingly mundane and turns it into something fascinating and often heartwarming. L. M. Montgomery's writing is flawless! It takes a truly great author to write both humor and sadness in the same book. I can think of no other writer I adore as much as her!

Another reason I love this book is because it doesn't really have a plot. Emily's father dies and she goes to live at New Moon with her two aunts, but aside from that the book just chronicles her adventures. It follows Emily as she changes, grows, writes, and lives at New Moon farm. Because of this, I can pick it up any time and not have to try and remember what happened before. Even though each chapter often stands alone, they all combine to tell the story of Emily as she begins to grow up. I will always adore this story!

However, there is one thing which bothers me about the book and wish I get so angry at Montgomery for. I so wish she had left it out. It is the relationship between Emily and Dean. Emily is 13 and Dean is 35....Awkward. This book doesn't have them in it together very much but when they are it is frustrating because Emily is so innocent and young, and Dean is waiting for her to grow up so he can marry her pretty much! It just leaves me feeling uncomfortable even though the author didn't intend for it to be that way. I think in the time this book was written, it probably wasn't as strange for age to make such a difference. Today, it just seems very creepy. Needless to say, it is the only thing that gives me qualms about the book and it is certainly something to watch out for. I think younger readers might not even pick up on this though because it seems rather subtle but I did when I was 14 though not as much as I do now. Ah but I hate to say anything bad about this book! Perhaps it won't bother others as much as it did me. I am loyal to Teddy!

Overall though, this was my favorite book as a child and it still is today! Emily is my favorite L. M. Montgomery heroine and I love her much much more than Anne from Anne of Green Gables. Compared to Emily, Anne seems unrealistic and not as serious. Emily is definitely a deeper story with more tragedy perhaps but also more beauty.

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itachi_forever

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Many people cite Emily of New Moon as one of their favorite children’s books. I never read L. M. Montgomery as a child, so that gauzy veil of childhood wonder is not cast over her novels for me. I started out enjoying Anne of Green Gables but got tired of it after a while. I did make it through Emily of New Moon but felt it could have been about 30 percent shorter.

As in Anne of Green Gables, Emily Byrd Starr is an orphan sent to live with people whose attachment to her is equivocal. Anne was so relentlessly upbeat that any lack of enthusiasm for her mostly slid off her back; Emily is more sensitive, and her story was more poignant for me. We got to see a brief glimpse of her life with her beloved father, which gave this story a ballast that Anne lacked. After he dies, she is taken to live at the farm of her already-deceased mother’s family, the hifalutin Murrays. The Murrays have lots of traditions and standards, which baffle Emily since all she has known was a less regimented and more permissive household. She comes to love the farm, New Moon, and some of its inhabitants as well as some neighbors.

To my ear Emily is not a very believable child of her age (ten to thirteen over the course of the book). She seems articulate beyond her years and possessed of an improbable degree of poise. Still, as a child who was only equivocally accepted in my childhood home, I resonated with her life and experiences. There is an awful lot of page time devoted to her passion for writing, and although I also shared that passion as a (slightly older) child, I felt less would have been more in the story. There is also a relationship with an adult that might have been normal at the time the book was written but reads as creepy today. I found myself hoping the adult in question got his comeuppance in the end, but that would have been a subject for a sequel. The characterizations of adults in the book were generally good, though—they were depicted from the egocentric, love-or-hate, ogre-or-sweetheart, extremist point of view of a child.

I can see this being a treasured book for an unusual child with few friends, and perhaps it would have been for me had I read it at an earlier age.

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yadnusbrekker

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Re-reading for our discussion on Friday, May 27th! https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Anne fans, I INSIST that you try Emily at some point.

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I love the Emily books so much. Her passion and her dreams, along with her dignity, were expressed in a way that really appealed to me when I read them as an impressionable teenager. The formative years of every girl's life are filled with wild hopes and worries and exhilaration, and as an adult, I re-read this series with a great deal of fondness.

I also love Teddy Kent. Such a romantic character, and how lovely to have your childhood friend be the love of your life!

Some of the anecdotes, like many of L.M. Montgomery's, do cross over into exaggerated predicaments and a wee bit of melodrama...but honestly, that's part of the fun of indulging in books like these.

n It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside-- but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond-- only a glimpse-- and heard a note of unearthly music.n

ETA/content warning: (for the series as a whole) Adult readers will certainly recognize severely problematic behaviors from Dean Priest, one of Emily's mentors when she's a little older. When I read the books as a child, I thought his later romantic attentions towards her were a little creepy, but mostly because OBVIOUSLY SHE IS MEANT TO BE WITH TEDDY. I was more bothered by his infuriating betrayal of her trust as far as her writing was concerned, and recognized that the age difference and time period play into his pursuit of her. Still, he exhibits controlling, possessive, manipulative behavior, and the power dynamics are terrible, even as mature and independent as Emily is. It's not brutally or aggressively controlling, but manipulation—and grooming—are there all the same.

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AlterSaber569

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Emily of New Moon is a charming story by L.M. Montgomery. Emily is an orphan raised by her aunts after the death of her father. She learns some humbling lessons along the way. What I liked most about Emily is her sense of wonder at nature and her delight in simple things. She is brave and courageous even when life is difficult. I didn’t enjoy this as much as Anne of Green Gables. Some of the plot is a bit repetitive and I found many similarities with Anne of Green Gables but the latter is much better. It is still a sweet story, however, and I’m interested to read the rest of the series.

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Emily #1

Emily of New Moon

l.m. montgomery

This edition

Emily Starr

Ilse Burnley

Teddy Kent

Perry Miller

Dean Priest

Jimmy Murray

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About the author

l.m. montgomery

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