Reviews for Rubyfruit Jungle (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)

The average rating for Rubyfruit Jungle (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-29 00:00:00 Dara Dyer This is the book I most wanted to buy in Prince Edward Island, but due to its size, did not want to pack in my tiny suitcase to fly back. It made such an impression on me that L.M. Montgomery did not create her book worlds out of thin air (I know, I know!), but spent her life collecting interesting bits of gossip, poems, flowers, colors, dresses, calling cards, pictures, and even mulch and cat fur (!) and pasting them into a large collection of scrapbooks. Many of these details are what made her books so rich and full of life. I have never had any desire to scrapbook, but hearing it described this way, I get it: "Scenes, dialogues, drama, stories -- the arranged items speak to each other, suggesting ways of seeing, being, and imagining. Amid the fragments of daily life, lifetime patterns and narrative lines emerge. The scrapbooks stored memories that could be revisited and reshaped into new life; to imagine Anne, Montgomery immersed herself in her own past." -p. 2 Reading this book also made me really want to know her personally. What a wonderful visual record of life, pre-Facebook and all. I'm glad that the author was able to unlock so much about LMM's timelines and what her abbreviations meant. "All her life, Montgomery, known to her friends as Maud, revelled in color; Anne of Green Gables is brimming with it. Many of her passions -- for kindred spirits, natural beauty, romance, poetry, words, fashion -- became her heroine Anne Shirley's. Montgomery experienced the everyday world as a vivid place -- full of humor as well as pathos. She was firmly anchored in the real world even though she could also travel freely in worlds of her own imagination. Similarly, Anne Shirley imagines that she should pine to be the heroine of a romance story, but actually she is enraptured with daily life, stricken dumb by the beauty of sunsets and apple boughs." -p. 1 "In scrapbooks she could preserve and celebrate special moments, and also explore and map ideas through images and colour. In mixed-media collages, chronology was not a restraint, and bright fragments could suggest metaphors and layers of story and feeling." -p. 3 "The scrapbooks are living records -- Montgomery edited them over the years and borrowed from them to illustrate her handwritten journals. She treated her diaries this way as well, rewriting events to conform to a larger story of her life. An intensely private person, Maud protected from casual view what was most painful and what was most vulnerable." -p. 4 "Montgomery edited her journals all her adult life, jotting down notes hurriedly and writing them up later when she had leisure to balance words and expressions." -p. 5 "Having secretly accepted the Rev. Ewan McDonald's proposal in October of 1906, the almost thirty-two-year-old Montgomery wrote that same day in her journal: 'Perfect and rapturous happiness, such as marriage with a man I loved intensely would give me, I have ceased to hope for.' She had felt rapturous happiness with Herman Leard when she was twenty-three, but they were both engaged to other people, and she did not consider him her equal in either intellect or ambition. The unfulfilled romance with Herman was to be the touchstone for passion for the rest of her life, and against which she would measure her physical attraction to Oliver Macneill in 1909." -Suitors, p. 32 "In celebrating adventures and romances, Montgomery preserved items she could draw on later in her fiction." -p. 38 Stopped p. 73

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-22 00:00:00 Peter S. Hamilton This book is FASCINATING. I'm just staggered that Maud kept such detailed scrapbooks so long ago, and that they were preserved--and now the world can read/look at them! I need to buy this book. I was only able to get partway through it before needing to return it to the library, but I will be looking for a copy to own for myself.