Recently a friend with stellar taste in literature was taken aback when she learned I’d never read any of L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” books. In my parenting days, my daughter and her Atlanta cousin both devoured as many of these stories as they could get their hands on, and two of my granddaughters, my daughter tells me, have read a few of these books multiple times. Our family watched one of the Green Gable films, but the books – well, it never crossed my mind even to dip into them. Weren’t they mostly for girls?

Inspired – and yes, shamed – by my friend, I swung by the library the next day and picked up the first book of the series. The only available copy was a plump volume decked with flowers and an archway of trees beneath which a red-haired girl is holding a valise. It’

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