Reviews for Emily of Deep Valley

The average rating for Emily of Deep Valley based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-13 00:00:00 Marybeth Mallios [2020 Review]: It felt very appropriate to revisit Emily in these current climes--someone who, I think, captures the isolation and loneliness and loss. Still one of the books that feels too familiar and too close. [2014 Review]: There are some books that just matter to you, you know? You finish them and feel gutted and raw and exposed and maybe a bit bitter that you've spent so much time without that book in your life. I've read all of the Betsy-Tacy books now, and I've loved them whole-heartedly. But I've never connected with Betsy or Winona or Carnie. I never fully engaged with their easiness, the way they always had a "Crowd", the way they fit in. I was an Emily, yearning and wanting and always a little apart. And I haven't encountered a lot of books that capture that loneliness so well. That sense of isolation and "lost years" and hurt. That lowness, and the spiraling, and sense of spinning wheels and waiting. But Emily of Deep Valley does, I think. She read avidly, indiscriminately, using them as an antidote for the pain in her heart. But they didn't help much. There was no one to talk them over with.My copy is all marked up already. There are just so many good passages to quote and to feel. She felt lonely and deserted and futile. "A mood like this has to be fought. it's like an enemy with a gun," she told herself. But she couldn't seem to find a gun with which to fight.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-15 00:00:00 Candace Vodden There were two books that sustained me the most during my first year of marriage - a year when everything was changing, I had moved away from everything and everyone I knew, and I was post-school but pre-job or -kids, when my new husband was working long hours and I had huge spaces of time just by myself, wondering what my purpose was. One book was The Blue Castle, by LM Montgomery. The other was this book, Emily of Deep Valley. The questions and struggles Emily endured, the feeling of something ended without something else starting, the need to "muster her wits" and make her own path ... it all provided such encouragement and hope to my lonely soul! I love that Emily's love story is secondary to her own self-discovery, that it provides a counterpoint to the lessons she is learning throughout her "lost year" but does not overshadow them. I love that Lovelace is not afraid to go against tradition - we are never sure if her heroines are going to end up with their first loves or with somebody new (in Lovelace's world, Anne Shirley and Roy Gardiner might very well have ended up more suitable to each other than Anne and Gilbert, shocking though that may seem!). I love that throughout everything she does is a thread of love and devotion to her grandfather, and never once is it suggested that she is wasting her life by staying with him. And I have to admit, I love all the descriptions of the clothes from back then! It is an old-fashioned story, but Emily is a heroine for all ages.