The character building was impressive. Montgomery managed to get the grating relatives just right, and I knew this because as I was reading their sections, I felt quite irritated! I also thought that Barney was portrayed well. He was a decent person, not some guy who waltzed in thinking he was some irresistible casanova. It was refreshing. I've been trying to please other people all my life and failed," she said. "After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I've breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretences and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth! I may not be able to do much that I want to do but I won't do another thing that I don't want to do. 'Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.'

Snaith. Tom built a house on the island where he lived in the winter; he rented it to people from Toronto in the summer (Chapter 26; 132).was Cecil Price, to whom she has been engaged for three years. Valancy sums her up thinking, "she's like When Valancy begins to feel some heart pains, she finally has the courage to go a doctor on the sly and find out why she is having these difficulties. His answer via letter causes her to have the courage to decide she will no longer be the passive, dull dog she has been in the past. When she finds out a childhood friend is suffering from TB and has nobody to care for her but her rough, often drunk alcoholic father - Roaring Abel, Valancy decides she will take up the post.

lived in New York, and he owned an island cottage in the Mistawis, which he arrived at when the ice thawed on the lake. He was considered lonely and eccentric, and he did not flatter those who sat for his portraits. Valancy meets With an atmospheric and vibrant writing, it is an engaging, compelling, and an enjoyable read. Apt as a winter-read for the biting yet romantic season, to be accompanied with a hot cup of cocoa in hand! Ah, now you have it," said Barney. "That's all the freedom we can hope for—the freedom to choose our prison. Hello one of my favourite books of all time, recently re-read to get me through what was a fairly stressful week, even for someone an ocean-away from the stress epicentre. I've felt the need for lighter fare these days. I'll leave reading War and Peace for other times. The Blue Castle sounded rather like a fairy tale and is deemed a "modern classic." That seemed like a good choice. However, I forgot something: Fairy tales are usually filled with sorrowful events. Remember Red Riding Hood's grandmother? Or a witch holding Hansel and Gretel captive to eat them?

Resit and first sit examinations

Valency then takes us on an adventure to her beloved Blue Castle, a place in her dreams which she visits when life becomes too unbearable. A place of calm, comfort and beauty which she created, and that is what makes it so special. I think we all have a place like that, whether it be in our minds, or reality. My place of calm is the forest. Valancy, the heroine (with that name, you just know that she thinks she's homely but she'll turn out to be secretly beautiful--to those with the right eyes to see her. Like the hero), lives under the thumb of as obnoxious a set of relatives as LMM ever invented. Oh boy is she downtrodden. There is not the tiniest detail of her miserable life that some relative or other isn't minding for her own good, and lecturing her endlessly about from the pinnacle of Mt. Moral Superiority. What I also adored about this book was Montgomery's veneration of nature. Although the book is set near Muskoka, Ontario, Montgomery got her nature-writing muse from PEI which is, in my humble opinion, one of the most beautiful places in Canada. Montgomery's descriptions of nature makes you want to be in it: She has no love, no prospects, no hope things will get any better. The only consolation she has is her fantasy place, which she calls The Blue Castle, and occasionally reading the books of John Foster on nature, though even something like reading is frowned upon by her mother, who considers this -as most things in life having anything to do with joy and happiness- a sin. Trent, Dr. - an elderly, absent-minded doctor who specializes in heart disease. He is over seventy years old