In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; wise beyond her years, outspoken and daring: not always good but always lovable. Her longing for a real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in her being established as a member of the Green Gables family. It is Anne who dominates the whole story. There are other characters, quaint too, and well-drawn, but the introduction of Anne into the community—Anne, so unconventional so imaginative, and so altogether different from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood—proves to be the invasion of a peculiar ferment, and the incidents which discover the process of fermentation are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking. _Anne of Avonlea_ follows the career of the orphan heroine and deals with two eventful years of school teaching. Miss Montgomery understands children thoroughly and makes her child characters of all types perfectly natural and lifelike. The same creative faculty which gave us in Anne an entirely new shadow-child shows itself in the portrayal of the mischievous but lovable Davy Keith, his demure twin sister Dora, the imaginative Paul Irving, and the many individualities of the pupils of Avonlea School. Plot interest is not a strong feature of this or of any of L. M. Montgomery’s novels. There are, nevertheless, several threads of action which bind together the series of incidents and secure continuity and unity. The nature descriptions reveal at once the author’s intimacy with nature and her poetic attitude of mind. Here is a typical passage:— A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind blowing up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long, red road, winding through fields and woods, now looping itself about a corner of thick set spruce, now threading a plantation of young maples with great feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now dipping down into a hollow where a brook flashed out of the woods and into them again, now basking in the open sunshine between ribbons of goldenrod and of myriads of crickets. _Chronicles of Avonlea_, a volume of short stories, contains some of her most finished work, showing that perfect art that conceals all art, and abounding in a strong vein of simple humour that is found in all her work. _The Story Girl_ and _The Golden Road_ are written with even less attention to a central plot than the earlier ‘Anne’ books. They are somewhat loosely connected series of incidents in which the same characters take part. But the community type of fiction does not demand thrilling plots. Other writers can write plot stories, but most other writers do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.