Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)'s Reviews > Jane of Lantern Hill

I'm about done with LMM.
I started this book several years ago and bailed on it before I got to the crux because it was so darn depressing. This time, by dint of what my GR friend Gundula calls "judicious skimming", I made it through to the end. Why I felt I had to, I cannot tell you.
Jane Stuart is a mashup of Anne Shirley and Little Elizabeth, the hard-done-by little girl from Summerside who lives with her jealous, vinegarish old grandmother and The Woman and has never seen her father. There's also a good dose of Marigold, with dominant grandmother ditto and feather-headed weak-willed mother who is Much Put Upon, but that doesn't stop Jane's Mummy from dressing to the nines and going to parties and dinners and theatres every day and night. Supposedly it's to distract her achy breaky heart, but it does seem as if she didn't mind all that much.

When Jane is suddenly sent for to spend the summer with her unknown father, she morphs into Anne Shirley: the queen of every social situation who is looked up to and admired by everyone on PEI, the can-do gal who shingles a roof or cooks a meal perfectly first time without ever having had the opportunity to do either before. She says at one point "I told Mr X (a much-older farmer) to nail his ridgepole down properly!" You can almost see the judgemental set of her lips! She solves every problem, settles every difference, gets a dying woman out of bed and on her feet, finds a home for a poor orphan, and saves the village from dangerous wild animals! Then we have the tired old trope of "my parents split up, and only I can solve their problems." Like you do. Not. That is really what took the third star.

I only knew this book existed because of a reference in a Harlequin Romance by Essie Summers, I believe it was Beyond the Foothills, in which someone tells the main character that the two houses on the estate were named New Moon and Lantern Hill so that the two young daughters, Jane and Emily, could identify with the Montgomery characters. Like parents do for their kids. Not. Maybe Summers saw herself as New Zealand's Montgomery, as she mentions her writing in almost every one of her books.

You owe me, Essie.