"The Story Girl" by L. M. Montgomery

I think my kids enjoyed this book even more than I did when I read it aloud to them this summer.  That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it, because I definitely did!  But I think they loved it even more.  Sometimes, with read-alouds, I am the one to say, "Hey, want me to read a bit?" but with this one, it was more often one of the kids saying, "Do you have time to read to us?"  Which was really delightful.

This is all about a group of kids on Prince Edward Island.  It's narrated by a guy named Beverly as an adult, looking back to a delightful summer from his childhood when he and his brother spent several months with an aunt and uncle and had fun with their cousins and friends.  The kids have all sorts of adventures together, get into mischief, learn some lessons, solve some problems for one another and others, and spend a lot of time listening to the Story Girl tell stories.

The title character's real name is Sara Stanley, but everyone calls her the Story Girl because she is so wonderful at telling stories.  She's fourteen and is blessed with both a vivid imagination and gift for storytelling.  She's the center of the group of kids -- not the leader, but the one their adventures always end up revolving around.  

This is one of those "slice of life" books I love that has a string of adventures and escapades and incidents in the lives of its characters, rather than one all-encompassing plot.  L. M. Montgomery excelled at both kinds of books, which is pretty amazing! 

Particularly Good Bits:

It is always safe to dream of spring.  For it is sure to come, and if it be not just as we have pictured it, it will be infinitely sweeter (p. 320).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Good, clean, wholesome fun!

This is my 26th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, and my 21st read from my TBR shelves for the 2024 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

"The Scarlet Letter" (Manga Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (original story), Crystal S. Chan (story adaptation), and SunNeko Lee (art)

I bought a few more of the Manga Classics in August -- some that my kids weren't all old enough for when we first got into them a couple of years ago.  I think they can handle them now -- or, at least, they are for this one.  Since The Scarlet Letter centers around an adulterous love affair that produces a child, I wanted to wait until my youngest was old enough to understand what all that meant rather than being confused and asking questions she wasn't ready for.  

They handled that topic even better in this manga than Hawthorne does, I think.  Granted, it's been twenty-ish years since I last read it, but both times I read and studied Hawthorne's novel in college, I found it distasteful.  Not just because he tended to sermonize incessantly, or because he told us about most of the conversations and things that occur throughout the book rather than showing them to us -- those are just marks of older writing and changed tastes, on a whole.  No, it felt like Hawthorne's attitude toward Hester Prynne was not entirely kindly.  He wanted the readers to sympathize with her, clearly, but the narration almost has this prudish prurience to it.  He disapproved of sex outside of marriage, but he was also super interested in exploring the topic.

Maybe that was just my high school and college self reading into it more than was there -- I don't actually care enough about this story to want to revisit the novel itself to see if my impression is accurate.

Anyway, this manga adaptation is lovely, kind, and straight-forward.  It does show many of the Puritans to be overly stern, some to be hypocritical, some to be downright ungodly... and some to be kind and forgiving.  I appreciated that they didn't try to villainize all Christians or even all Puritans.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for the subject matter aforementioned.  Nothing smutty or provocative in the artwork or storytelling, but the storyline is what it is.