When Anne Shirley arrived in Avonlea in L.M. Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables, she upset the status quo with her vivid imagination and refusal to adapt to a hive-minded culture. That classic story has never left pop culture, with adaptations that have included a Japanese anime series, a hit TV movie series in the 80s, the long-running TV series Road to Avonlea, and most recently the Netflix series Anne with an E. They’ve all stayed pretty close to Montgomery’s 1908 story, expanding on its themes and ideals. And while the same can be said of Anne of Greenville, a modern-day contemporized version of the story, this one “hits different,” as the kids would say.
(Hyperion/Melissa de la Cruz Studio)
The debut novel from Melissa de la Cruz Studio, a new imprint of Hyperion, comes from author Mariko Tamaki. She lends her own Japanese-American identity to the modern-day Anne Shirley, the adopted daughter of a Lesbian couple (Lucy and Millie – L and M – a nod to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s initials). The novel is preceded by a trigger warning for “experiences related to sexual and racial identity,” with both of those themes being part of what makes Anne stick out in her new small town in middle America. Not only is she Asian and queer in a small town full of predominantly white heterosexuals, but she also leans into an affinity for all things 70s, preferring to rollerblade everywhere, blasting disco music, and wearing vintage threads like bell bottoms and fringe. The vision that you likely have in your head of Anne is incorporated through the character’s obsession with the color orange, which extends to her artificially colored hair.
It’s easy to find all of the hallmark elements of Anne of Green Gables in the text, but I was also reminded of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen by Dyan Sheldon. The book is written in the first person, with Anne telling her story in her own dramatic way (with lots of teenage lingo like “like” and ending sentences in an uptick question mark). Much of the drama centers around the school play, a production of Peter Pan that upsets the Greenville apple cart because the school has been doing Our Town since the Thornton Wilder classic’s inception. The presence of J.M. Barrie’s fairytale and the tradition of gender-bending in the casting of the lead role adds more contemporary views of gender identity and expression to the story, but the book often reads like a mishmash of both Anne of Green Gables and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
With an age recommendation of 14 and up, Anne of Greenville drops a surprising amount of f-bombs for a YA novel. The bullying also gets pretty intense, with several of Anne’s classmates throwing out both racist and homophobic slurs without any subtlety. There’s even some physical violence to be found, and Anne doesn’t put up much of a fight, with the exception of daring to be herself in the face of adversity. It leaves you feeling melancholic and sorry for her for the vast majority of the novel.
As was the case with Anne of Green Gables, this Anne Shirley is given both a kindred spirit best friend through Berry (a nod to Diana Barry from the original) and a bully-turned-love-interest named Gilly (a gender-bent Gilbert). Although this contemporized version also throws in a trope of queer stories that I find both predictably frustrating and inauthentic to real-life – falling in love with your same-sex best friend. After so much will-they/won’t-they build-up with Anne and Gilly, the rapid conclusion that Anne should end up as Berry’s girlfriend feels more like an attempt to surprise readers familiar with the original novel than what this contemporized retelling was in need of.
The average reader of Anne of Greenville will likely be a current high schooler who may not have much or any knowledge of Anne of Green Gables (or what a gable is). It does a great job of placing readers in the shoes of someone being othered and bullied. While Anne is more passive than you want her to be, she handles it with as much dignity and class as possible. Diehard fans of Montgomery’s novels will delight in all of the nods to the original (Tamaki even works in raspberry cordial), but will also find that Anne of Greenville is very much its own story that stands apart from the source material.
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