L.M. Montgomery has a special place in my heart. Her tales have a special flavor that only she brings to the page. The stories made me chuckle and shed a tear. Montgomery's writing style is not for everyone but I find it appealing.

If truth be told, this 1979 collection of L.M. Montgomery short stories (collected and edited by Catherine McLay) has never even remotely ranked amongst my favourites. And yes, the primary reason for my for the most part pretty lacklustre reading reaction to the Doctor’s Sweetheart and Other Stories is first and foremost simply because McLay has included far far too many tales of lost and found love, of matchmaking for my reading tastes and really to the point that reading The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories does have the tendency to become annoyingly tedious, especially if one is like me and finds in particular matchmaking and too much romance one of the only aspects of L.M. Montgomery's fiction that can and does wear more than a bit thin at times (but indeed especially if one is constantly quasi being hit over the proverbial head with this).

In other words, while I can and do for example somewhat (even if often rather grudgingly) tolerate Anne Shirley and her recurring penchant for matchmaking and lovemaking because there is also so much more within the pages of the Anne of Green Gables series to mitigate and lessen the latter, in The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories there has always been a to and for me annoying and frustrating surfeit of romance so to speak (and that many of the presented tales of The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories if not even the vast majority of them, have equally tended to read more than a bit repetitively, with the same themes rehashed over and over again, not really an issue for me, I guess, if these concepts are actually of personal interest, but if they are not, well, that is of course an entirely different story).

And while I would definitely NOT ever go so far as to not recommend The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories (as individuals, as potential readers who actually like and appreciate tales generally super-heavy with themes of love, marriage and the like, might very well find The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories desirable and readable), I for one certainly do find that for me, this here offering of presented L.M. Montgomery short fiction is barely adequate at best, and also does NOT AT ALL pass the test for rereading potential either (with the latter being for me what in fact makes personal classics, what makes literature). And that yes indeed, rereading (and with this I of course mean doing so for pleasure and not for academic necessity) is something that I simply cannot and will not consider with The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories, as Catherine McLay has most definitely chosen to include frustratingly and annoyingly just far far too many L.M. Montgomery short stories that I simply do not really enjoy all that much from a thematic and a content-based point of view and indeed equally so far far too few tales that I actually and personally am able to wholeheartedly and happily enjoy.

Este es mi primer acercamiento a la obra de Lucy Maud Montgomery, quien en últimas fechas ha generado un nuevo interés en el público lector, esto porque una de sus novelas se adaptó a serie por parte de Netflix: Ana de las Tejas Verdes.

Aun no leo las aventuras de Ana, pero tenía a la mano esta compilación de catorce relatos, y ahora que la he concluido tengo sentimientos encontrados.

Muchas de las historias son tiernas, eso no lo puedo negar, pero también me daban algo de repeluz y constantemente me tenía que estar recordando mentalmente que fueron escritas entre 1899 y 1935.
Una época en la cual no era nada raro que se creyera que el matrimonio fuera la cúspide de la felicidad para las mujeres. Si ser una solterona en pleno siglo XXI es muy mal visto por algunas personas, ahora no me imagino a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX:

A pesar de todo he de reconocer que Montgomery dotó a sus personajes con caracteres, inteligencia y determinación necesarios para salir adelante ante la adversidad y reconocer cuando había errado en sus acciones.

Por otro lado, el estilo de escritura me gustó mucho: Sin vicios de lenguaje y rico en descripciones.

En fin, que esta compilación es ideal para todos los amantes de la literatura romántica y para quienes quiera adentrarse en lo que escribió esta mujer.

You’d be hard pressed to find a L. M. Montgomery book I don’t like, even her short stories. I hadn’t read this collection before so they were all new, although several of them were familiar, because she eventually reused the plots in some her novels. And one of them had the exact same plot as the first few chapters of one of my favorite vintage novels, The Indifference of Juliet. That book was written in 1905, so I’m wondering if Maud was maybe familiar with the story.

Anyhow, regardless, these stories are all charming, as usual. I n  willn say, they’re best taken a few at a time, as many of the themes are similar and can get a little repetitive if you read them all in a row.

Decent read.

Todas las historias están muy bien escritas, me gustaron aunque ninguna es especialmente romántica (the doctor's sweetheart, que da titulo al libro, es un poco creepy...) pero son divertidas y muy del estilo de la autora. Algunos relatos han sido básicamente copiados y pegados en sus novelas, así que recomiendo leer esta recopilación si quieres leer todo de L.M Montgomery.

Favs: Emily's Husband, The Finished Story, The Garden of Spices, The Bride is Waiting.

I really liked this collection. Some of the stories were very strong - stronger than in the other short stories books, I felt. I am just amazed that Montgomery manages to catch so much of human nature, emotion, and life, in such short stories.

The Girl and the Wild Race was my favorite - I had to stop reading for a while after it, because the excitement! the adventure! the love! It was too much, haha. I liked most stories of estranged lovers getting back together, particularly Kismet and Emily's Husband. The Promise of Lucy Ellen and I Know a Secret were both in the Anne books; but the latter was one of my least favorite parts of Anne of Ingleside and it was basically textually the same (with "Jane" replaced by "Nan" and a love story tackled on in an ending paragraph, but that was pretty much it), whereas the former still packed a punch for me, particularly since the West sisters both have an happy ending in Anne, and not here.

I liked the humour of Julius Caesar (I was startled for a second when two stranded ladies suggested that they call someone - and proceeded to scream their heads out, because that is the only way to call someone in 1900) and the trickery of The Bride is Waiting and the lovely, Secret Garden-like feeling of The Garden of Spices. The only stories I liked less were the ones without romance, basically, hah. It's always a pleasure to read Montgomery's version of it.

A collection of short stories written by L M Montgomery for magazines, etc. I am not a big fan of short stories, but a dear friend sent me a collection of L M Montgomery's works, so I read and enjoyed them, for the most part. They were mostly stories of lost love once again found. Unfortunately, the stories in each of the collections was grouped by the story line, so once you've read a few of them, you can predict how the story will end. It seems Montgomery had formulas for the stories she wrote, changing the names, places, and circumstances slightly to vary the stories.

I enjoyed her books much more, but that was more than 25 years ago. I didn't discover the Anne series until I found them on a visit to the library when I was helping my daughter find books. They were filled with such optimism. If you haven't read a biography on her, you will that she was quite a remarkable woman for the time period in which she lived. And she didn't have the easiest life, either.

No surprise here, it's a truly lovely collection of short stories, as all L M. Montgomery's works. What a nice surprise to find one I hadn't read.

You never know what you'll get in an LMM story collection. You may get a plot that was reworked into an Anne story, you may get tragedy, sympathy, comedy, or just plain creepy(which are not my favorites). I generally skim though until I find one I'm in the mood for. But, whatever the type of tale, it's hard to shake the feeling that Montgomery's reality is either somewhere behind the words, heavily disguised as someone else or desperately trying to be forgotten in a whimsical alternate reality.

Una bonita colección de historias sobre segundas oportunidades, con premisas variadas e incluso divertidas.