As you know, I was reading the saga of Anne of Green Gables (yes, "I was", in the past tense, I'll explain why), and I just finished books #3 and #4.

This is the third book in the saga, and it tells us about Anne's life when she leaves for college, at Redmond College. Here, Anne reunites with her friend Priscilla, Gilbert and Charlie from Avonlea, and meets Philippa, who despite having a sometimes very frivolous and childish personality for her age, establishes a beautiful friendship with the two girls from Prince Edward Island. Here we see how the girls manage to live together in The House of Patty while they study, attend their classes at the university and go to various parties.

I really liked this book because we were able to see Anne as a practically independent woman, who makes her own decisions about the direction she wants for her life, and even gets many marriage proposals from boys. Without a doubt it is a book that has a lot of dynamism, because things are always happening in Anne's life and it is exciting to accompany her through the pages, which is why I got excited and continued reading the next book.

Here we see Anne already graduated from college as a Bachelor of Arts, working as the principal of a school located in Summerside. There, Anne stays at a boarding house called Windy Poplars, where she meets two widows who own the boarding house, Aunts Kate and Chatty, Rebbeca Dew, the housekeeper, and the cat, Dusty Miller. As with most people Anne meets, the old women quickly become attached to the girl and advise her on the beliefs and customs of the town, as well as the gossip about the families who live there, such as the Pringle family who make Anne's life feel like hell during the first few months of her stay.

I have to be honest with you... Contrary to what happened to me with book 3, with Anne of Windy Poplars I got bored to death. Despite the fact that things happen, I think the whole plot remains very static and all the action can be summed up as village gossip. And ok, maybe it's natural that this happened because in the end Anne was living in a village... but it lacked action, A LOT of action. And since the action was basically summarized in village gossip, I got the feeling that those mini stories were kind of filler in the book and didn't add much to the main plot.

Despite this, I liked the idea that a large part of the book was made up of extracts from the letters that Anne wrote to Gilbert. However, one thing I regret is that certain types of letters were not present, simply because Anne "did not have the right pen". The truth this bothered me a little, because it seemed a great excuse not to develop that relationship that is clearly important in the history of Anne Shirley, and for some reason the author decided that it would be more important to develop village gossip. Source of image

Anyway, I would have liked the book to also contain these letters to accompany the way in which the relationship between Anne and Gilbert develops, which we hardly see in this book, unlike the previous ones. In addition, it would have been good to see how Gilbert had done in those three years he was separated from Anne, perhaps also putting extracts from the letters he sent to her, not just focus on Anne, a little to have a different perspective on the story. Personally, reading several letters written by Anne and consecutively became very monotonous. Source of image

For all these reasons, I must say that with Anne of Windy Poplars I was very disappointed and I lost a little bit the desire to continue with the rest of the saga. However, as I don't want to fall into a reading slump, I'm going to leave the books of Anne Shirley a little aside for the moment, and dedicate myself to reading something by Agatha Christie. For some reason, her books are fresh to me every time I read them, and I think this is just what I need at this moment to revive myself, after having read this book that I didn't like so much.