Like most of the Anne books, there isn’t really much of plot for the book it is instead a series of interconnected stories that slip through the years like ‘pearls on a string’, though this one probably has one of the strongest plots of the series. Anne is in college along with Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloan from Avonlea as well as Pricilla Grant, her friend from the high school she attended in the last book. Anne also gets no fewer then five proposals in this book, and it is something of a love story. The main romance has been building for some time and the moment when it finally pays off has probably ruined me for a lot of romance novels. The other proposals seem to be there mostly to take some of the romantic shine and expectations Anne had developed about proposals. For all that Montgomery is essentially writing a romance novel, she had no fear at taking potshots at the overblown romance novelists of the day as she shows the rather prosaic ways that men and women court each other, and how expectations built by those novels can actually blind us to what love really is.

As with the previous two books, I can practically recite this book from memory. The many stories from when Anne and Pricilla meet the flighty, silly Philippa and become fast friends to the adventures of Rusty the cat and beyond all play out like familiar songs, except for a few chapters in the last third. I’m not sure that I have ever before read the entirety of this book as some of the stories this time were completely new to me as I forced myself to read all the book. You see, Anne makes a terrible, wrong, bad, HORRIBLE decision about a two thirds of the way through the novel and I must have skimmed the chapters between that decision and when she finally rectifies it starting the very first time I read this novel and have done so for every re-read since, excepting this one. I didn’t completely skip them, as some of the stories between that BAD, HORRIBLE, WRONG decision and the moment she fixes it are just as familiar as all the other stories, but some were completely surprising. Even on this re-read, the temptation to skip over the parts where Anne was being stupid and WRONG was quite high, but I forced my way through and was charmed by the ‘new’ stories.

If life were a person, I want it to be like Anne Shirley.

When I first started reading the Anne of Green Gables series I was a pre-teen. I had never left my hometown at that point, and knew that Canada lay north. I imagined that Canada was just the Niagara Falls because that's all I ever saw about it on television. To read a story about an orphaned girl that comes to live with a brother and sister and slowly worms her way into the hearts of them and her neighbors living on Prince Edward Island in the 1900s.

I chose to read book #3 of the series because honestly this is my favorite. We get to see Anne, Gilbert Blythe, Charlie Sloane and Priscilla Grant (all old friends of Anne's) going to Redmond College in Nova Scotia.

Anne is definitely more mature in this book, and a lot of subjects that are looked at definitely are more somber than previous books. I loved Anne a lot in this book because even though she didn't want to admit how everyone and everything is changing, she realizes that she can't keep herself and others frozen based on how they behaved as children. Anne has a falling out with Charlie Sloane (has a chilly reconciliation) and starts to see that she feels something for Gilbert Blythe, but doesn't think it's love. When Anne meets someone else who is her romantic ideal, she initially is happy, but starts to wonder if this is what she's looking for.

We have the introduction of a new characters in this one, Phillipa Gordon, who I found to be funny. We also get to revisit with old characters such as Anne's kindred spirit, Diana Barry, Marilla, Mrs. Lynde, and Dora and Davy Keith who Marilla took in during book #2 (Anne of Avonlea).

The writing is not really complex in these books and honestly I like that. Once you read the first Anne of Green Gables books you will get a better idea about the people and past escapades of Anne.

The flow for this one was not that great though. I think it's because you have a huge passage of time in just a short amount of pages. A lot of events felt rushed and summed up in just a few short paragraphs.

The setting of Redmond College does come alive in this book. One great thing that L.M. Montgomery always did in these books was set a perfect scene of where places are and how they looked.

The ending was one of my favorites in this series. We have Anne having her eyes truly opened about what she wants and who she wants to share her future with. I always thought it was a wonderful the way things wrapped up.

I always enjoy spending time with Anne and am probably going to go back and read the other books in this series later this year.

Ahh, Anne. Every time I visit her I sigh wistfully. She's such a romantic dreamer! It's so fun to see her grow up without losing her core spunk and joie de vivre.