Kiss My Knits!

Last week I decided that Em had been watching too much TV and playing too much on the computer. I told her we were going to be going to the library so she could pick out a good chapter book to read. She thought for a few minutes and told me she wanted Anne of Green Gables. I’m sure that this is because last year she saw some clip on the internet from an animated show about Anne of Green Gables. Also because Anne has long red hair, which Em thinks is gorgeous.

Now, this is an ambitious book for Em. Here’s the first sentence of the book she’d been reading previously, “Willow the Wednesday Fairy.”
“This is great!” Rachel Walker said, beaming at her best friend, Kirsty Tate, as they wandered around the Tippington Community Center Arts and Crafts Fair.

Now here’s the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

Whew.

Em has been scanning it for the last day or so. That’s what she’s doing in this picture. Sometimes she needs to get a running start at things. So tonight I said we needed to read some before bed and she could pick out any of the library books we’d brought home (I had checked out some slightly less challenging options, just in case). I told her I’d be happy to read some to her, too. She decided she was going to read two chapters of Anne of Green Gables. Two chapters of one of her fairy paperbacks span 20 pages of large type liberally dosed with large illustrations.

We went for ten pages of Anne and she realized the end of the first chapter was further off than she thought, so we stopped. Believe me, that was plenty. We traded off sentences, but what usually happened was that she would read, then I would start in and she would wave me off and read more. There were a lot of words and phrases for a literal-minded child to stumble over, like “run the unseen gantlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eye.” When we were done with the ten pages I restated it for her, because sometimes a little translation helps.

This was vastly above her usual age range, but she’s sticking with it. She’s reading ahead to see where certain things happen, like where Anne will meet her friend Diana. Here’s hoping she continues to enjoy it, and that it inspires her to a larger world of reading not as a chore, but as a joy.

Let’s leave the final word to Ms. Montgomery.

” ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,’ ” whispered Anne softly.