"The Golden Road" by L. M. Montgomery

My kids and I enjoyed The Story Girl so very much when I read it aloud to them last year that we decided to read the sequel together this year.  Happily, I still remembered all the voices I had given the characters, even though I had read a couple of other books aloud to them in between.

This was a lot of fun, and we laughed a great deal over the little magazine that the kids put together periodically, simply called Our Magazine.  We all looked forward to those chapters because they were sure to set us howling with laughter.  But there were poignant things here too, like the repeated foreshadowing that one character would not live long past childhood.  Happily, none of them died during the story, but you knew that one of them was going to in the next few years.

The ending is also bittersweet, as the gang of friends breaks up and goes their separate ways.

We need more children's books like this where it's just a lot of fun adventures had by a group of kids who are friends.  Nothing truly awful happens to them, or anything unbelievable.  They just get into and out of a bit of mischief here and there, have some adventures, have quarrels and make up, and so on.  I love slice-of-life books like this, and you never know, I might write one someday.

Particularly Good Bits: "Nothing is ever lost to us as long as we remember it" (p. 257).

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

This has been my 46th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.  Getting so close to finishing off another set of fifty classics!!!