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My only complaints about this book are in the story itself - some characters I would have liked to see more of. That's it. The execution is flawless, hence the five stars.
Emily Climbs picks up shortly after n Emily of New Moonn. Our heroine is happily scribbling her days away in the company of her three besties when she learns that all three—Ilse, Perry, and Teddy—are going to high school a few towns away. Strict Aunt Elizabeth will only allow Emily to join them if the girl swears off writing fiction for the next three years. Her soul quailing at this injustice, Emily takes the offer, and half of the book is the diary she keeps to stave off madness during this period.
Despite Aunt Ruth—a tyrant so Draconian she makes Elizabeth Murray look positively reasonable—and the mean girl machinations of one Evelyn Blake—the four amigos manage to get into all kinds of memorable scrapes, as they always have. Yet something indescribable has changed, particularly between Emily and Teddy. She can sense it but can’t give it a name. She also has a mystical experience that leads to the discovery of a lost child.
The fiction ban doesn’t stop E.B. Starr from writing, though – she gains recognition for her poems and essays, and becomes aware of burgeoning career opportunities by the end of the book. Will she pursue her muse to New York, the land of publishing, and forsake her heritage? Will she stay on the Island to endure obscurity and small-minded gossip (of which she has already often been a victim)? Is there a third way?
And then there’s Dean Priest, he of the deep thoughts and striking green eyes, who wants to teach Emily how to write a realistic conversation between lovers. At seventeen years old, she still isn’t sure what precisely he means by this. Never underestimate the ability of a Victorian/Edwardian heroine to not notice when a man is in love with her.
Like most of Montgomery’s work, the book is episodic, with little overarching plot, but the characters still grow and change. Emily, in particular, matures a lot over the course of the story while maintaining all the key components of her personality. It’s tempting to compare her to her author’s famous Anne, but while the two girls are similar they’re hardly the same. Emily is very much Montgomery herself—brilliant, insightful, caring but proud, romantic but sarcastic, sometimes even cruel. While the girl is repeatedly described as beautiful, she’s so flawed that the tired old accusation, “Mary Sue!”, boomerangs right off her.
Her three friends are much the same as ever. Ilse is still a big, maladjusted but somehow lovable, spitfire (at one point she even declares her intention to “knock [someone’s] block off” like Lucy van Pelt) who nurses a crush on Perry that is obvious to everyone except its object. Perry is still coarse and clumsy and determined—both in terms of his political career and Emily, who is colder with him than she needs to be. Teddy at least has more than three lines of dialogue in this one, and we see first-hand what a ghoul his mother is instead of just hearing about it, but he’s still a flat designated dreamboat with few if any character traits.
The host of Aunts are a hoot, as always, especially that suspicious old rascal Ruth, who is finally revealed to be a human being 75% into the book. From Montgomery, one gathers that the average resident of Prince Edward Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was obsessed with family histories, never forgot a scandal, and harbored a deep fear of French Canadians, Catholics, and Americans.
Dean is easily the most developed and intriguing character, after Emily, and both the girl and the book take on a deeper, spookier and more mature aspect every time he shows up. I wish he had stuck around more, but he does get a lot more screen time (page time?) than he did in book I, and I’m grateful for that. This man is actually interesting. Twenty years older than Emily and embittered by implied experience, he has connected deeply with this girl and hopes to marry her when she comes of age. He lights up her imagination and sets her soul loose in a way that sweet little Teddy, for all his good intentions, could never do.
I think she picks Teddy in book III. I’m not happy about that, but Montgomery probably knew that her fans would prefer a Gilbert/Anne style pairing to Hades and Persephone on PEI. But Teddy only resembles Gilbert superficially. Gilbert and Anne’s first years of acquaintance were fraught with miscommunication and angst, that both of them had to power through, shedding their egos along the way, in order to even become friends. Even after they were married, their differences caused friction—and they kept growing as people all through the series.
There is no quarrel or friction, or tension of any sort, between Emily and Teddy. They are friends. They have never been anything but friends. Their spats, when they have them, are tiny and meaningless and quickly forgotten. Neither of them poses the tiniest challenge to the other.
Dean, on the other hand, is Emily’s opposite in many ways—his worldliness against her innocence, his secrecy against her sleeve-dwelling heart, his control-freak tendencies against her wildness. Yet they can talk with each other in a way they could never hope to with anyone else; their hopes, dreams and worries are cut from the same light-and-dark cloth. The chemistry between them is palpable. He is her shadow, and whatever happens in the end, they belong together.
CONTENT ADVISORY: I feel obligated to feature this because a lot of folks assume a book from the author of Anne of Green Gables must be rated G. This one, like the first in its series, is PG.
Violence: The usual for this time period. Nothing shown, but a few references to women, children and animals getting beaten.
Sex: Really nothing to worry about, except that Emily, now in her late teens, is starting to dress like an adult and the young menfolk NOTICE. Rumors of impropriety attach themselves to her, namely that she and Ilse went skinny-dipping (they wore their chemises and bloomers) and that both girls spent the night disreputably with Perry and Teddy (they were caught in a blizzard and had to shelter in an abandoned house overnight).
I will also use this space to clarify that Dean is not a pedophile, as some of you have so gleefully labelled him.
A pedophile is an adult with a perverse sexual attraction to small children—ten years old or younger. Someone who likes postpubescent teens is an ephebophile. The last strikes me as an almost unnecessary term, since a kid of either gender over the age of sixteen or seventeen is physically an adult, and was considered one in most societies until the last century or so.
Emily was thirteen or so when Dean met her, but had an old face for her age and implied to be well along in puberty. I personally wish that their meeting had taken place one or two years later, but nothing inappropriate happened then, or has happened yet.
Observe that when Dean found Emily she was clinging to a root or vine for dear life, since the ground of the cliff she’d been walking along had fallen away beneath her. If he were really a sexual predator, he would have pulled this helpless girl back to safety and then done something unspeakable to her, or at least pretended to be her friend while plotting to rape her at a later date. Not only did he do no such thing, but he brought her home promptly, safe and sound.
They have been going on long walks alone together, often at night, for four years now, and he has never once made a move—except arguably for the one time we see him in this book, where she teasingly asks him to help her with some of that romantic dialogue and he almost kisses her—but even then, he waits for her permission and when she panics and grabs a cat to bury her face in, he backs off again. What a sick, perverted man. He gives Harvey Weinstein a run for his money. (I jest).
Language: Frequent use of the word “ass” which back then was more likely to mean “idiot” than “rear end.”
Substance Abuse: Perry tells Ilse to drink some whiskey to help her upset stomach—which the town gossips naturally elaborate into a bacchanal.
All in all, a very good book that leaves me eager for the third and final installment.
Emily Climbs picks up shortly after n Emily of New Moonn. Our heroine is happily scribbling her days away in the company of her three besties when she learns that all three—Ilse, Perry, and Teddy—are going to high school a few towns away. Strict Aunt Elizabeth will only allow Emily to join them if the girl swears off writing fiction for the next three years. Her soul quailing at this injustice, Emily takes the offer, and half of the book is the diary she keeps to stave off madness during this period.
Despite Aunt Ruth—a tyrant so Draconian she makes Elizabeth Murray look positively reasonable—and the mean girl machinations of one Evelyn Blake—the four amigos manage to get into all kinds of memorable scrapes, as they always have. Yet something indescribable has changed, particularly between Emily and Teddy. She can sense it but can’t give it a name. She also has a mystical experience that leads to the discovery of a lost child.
The fiction ban doesn’t stop E.B. Starr from writing, though – she gains recognition for her poems and essays, and becomes aware of burgeoning career opportunities by the end of the book. Will she pursue her muse to New York, the land of publishing, and forsake her heritage? Will she stay on the Island to endure obscurity and small-minded gossip (of which she has already often been a victim)? Is there a third way?
And then there’s Dean Priest, he of the deep thoughts and striking green eyes, who wants to teach Emily how to write a realistic conversation between lovers. At seventeen years old, she still isn’t sure what precisely he means by this. Never underestimate the ability of a Victorian/Edwardian heroine to not notice when a man is in love with her.
Like most of Montgomery’s work, the book is episodic, with little overarching plot, but the characters still grow and change. Emily, in particular, matures a lot over the course of the story while maintaining all the key components of her personality. It’s tempting to compare her to her author’s famous Anne, but while the two girls are similar they’re hardly the same. Emily is very much Montgomery herself—brilliant, insightful, caring but proud, romantic but sarcastic, sometimes even cruel. While the girl is repeatedly described as beautiful, she’s so flawed that the tired old accusation, “Mary Sue!”, boomerangs right off her.
Her three friends are much the same as ever. Ilse is still a big, maladjusted but somehow lovable, spitfire (at one point she even declares her intention to “knock [someone’s] block off” like Lucy van Pelt) who nurses a crush on Perry that is obvious to everyone except its object. Perry is still coarse and clumsy and determined—both in terms of his political career and Emily, who is colder with him than she needs to be. Teddy at least has more than three lines of dialogue in this one, and we see first-hand what a ghoul his mother is instead of just hearing about it, but he’s still a flat designated dreamboat with few if any character traits.
The host of Aunts are a hoot, as always, especially that suspicious old rascal Ruth, who is finally revealed to be a human being 75% into the book. From Montgomery, one gathers that the average resident of Prince Edward Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was obsessed with family histories, never forgot a scandal, and harbored a deep fear of French Canadians, Catholics, and Americans.
Dean is easily the most developed and intriguing character, after Emily, and both the girl and the book take on a deeper, spookier and more mature aspect every time he shows up. I wish he had stuck around more, but he does get a lot more screen time (page time?) than he did in book I, and I’m grateful for that. This man is actually interesting. Twenty years older than Emily and embittered by implied experience, he has connected deeply with this girl and hopes to marry her when she comes of age. He lights up her imagination and sets her soul loose in a way that sweet little Teddy, for all his good intentions, could never do.
I think she picks Teddy in book III. I’m not happy about that, but Montgomery probably knew that her fans would prefer a Gilbert/Anne style pairing to Hades and Persephone on PEI. But Teddy only resembles Gilbert superficially. Gilbert and Anne’s first years of acquaintance were fraught with miscommunication and angst, that both of them had to power through, shedding their egos along the way, in order to even become friends. Even after they were married, their differences caused friction—and they kept growing as people all through the series.
There is no quarrel or friction, or tension of any sort, between Emily and Teddy. They are friends. They have never been anything but friends. Their spats, when they have them, are tiny and meaningless and quickly forgotten. Neither of them poses the tiniest challenge to the other.
Dean, on the other hand, is Emily’s opposite in many ways—his worldliness against her innocence, his secrecy against her sleeve-dwelling heart, his control-freak tendencies against her wildness. Yet they can talk with each other in a way they could never hope to with anyone else; their hopes, dreams and worries are cut from the same light-and-dark cloth. The chemistry between them is palpable. He is her shadow, and whatever happens in the end, they belong together.
CONTENT ADVISORY: I feel obligated to feature this because a lot of folks assume a book from the author of Anne of Green Gables must be rated G. This one, like the first in its series, is PG.
Violence: The usual for this time period. Nothing shown, but a few references to women, children and animals getting beaten.
Sex: Really nothing to worry about, except that Emily, now in her late teens, is starting to dress like an adult and the young menfolk NOTICE. Rumors of impropriety attach themselves to her, namely that she and Ilse went skinny-dipping (they wore their chemises and bloomers) and that both girls spent the night disreputably with Perry and Teddy (they were caught in a blizzard and had to shelter in an abandoned house overnight).
I will also use this space to clarify that Dean is not a pedophile, as some of you have so gleefully labelled him.
A pedophile is an adult with a perverse sexual attraction to small children—ten years old or younger. Someone who likes postpubescent teens is an ephebophile. The last strikes me as an almost unnecessary term, since a kid of either gender over the age of sixteen or seventeen is physically an adult, and was considered one in most societies until the last century or so.
Emily was thirteen or so when Dean met her, but had an old face for her age and implied to be well along in puberty. I personally wish that their meeting had taken place one or two years later, but nothing inappropriate happened then, or has happened yet.
Observe that when Dean found Emily she was clinging to a root or vine for dear life, since the ground of the cliff she’d been walking along had fallen away beneath her. If he were really a sexual predator, he would have pulled this helpless girl back to safety and then done something unspeakable to her, or at least pretended to be her friend while plotting to rape her at a later date. Not only did he do no such thing, but he brought her home promptly, safe and sound.
They have been going on long walks alone together, often at night, for four years now, and he has never once made a move—except arguably for the one time we see him in this book, where she teasingly asks him to help her with some of that romantic dialogue and he almost kisses her—but even then, he waits for her permission and when she panics and grabs a cat to bury her face in, he backs off again. What a sick, perverted man. He gives Harvey Weinstein a run for his money. (I jest).
Language: Frequent use of the word “ass” which back then was more likely to mean “idiot” than “rear end.”
Substance Abuse: Perry tells Ilse to drink some whiskey to help her upset stomach—which the town gossips naturally elaborate into a bacchanal.
All in all, a very good book that leaves me eager for the third and final installment.
