I cannot even begin to explain how much I loved The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery.
This was the first book I had read by her that was not in the Anne of Green Gables series and I was blown away by it.
The voice in this book was eons away from what I’d read in Anne of Green Gables and that’s not meant to disparage Anne. I absolutely loved Anne of Green Gables and a couple of the other books in the series (a couple I did not like at all ) but The Blue Castle was even more bold and romantic and poetic.
It read more like a book that would have been written at a time later than 1926. Way beyond its years, this book captivated me with its boldness and enchanted me with its heartwarming essence.
I love the main character, even if I wouldn’t have made some of the choices she made – though, maybe I would have if I had been in the circumstances she had been.
Valancy is 29 years old but is treated like a child by her mother, cousins, aunts, and uncles. They refer to her as overweight, boring, half-witted, and expect her to do what they say. They act like she’s always sick or going to get sick. She never does anything exciting and wants to be in love but never has or had anyone love her.
To get herself through her mundane days, she imagines a “blue castle” where everything is bright and beautiful and handsome suitors come to court her. She dreams of a day where someone will love her and take her away from the dark sadness of her life. She reads books about nature and how to connect with it by a man named John Foster, escaping from her world through his beautiful words.
She’s been having pains in her chest, though, and she doesn’t like doctors but she finally decides to go to one. When she does, her entire life changes. Her life begins right before she is told it will end.
She begins to change how she acts and acts completely differently from how she has acted all of her life. Her change in her future shakes her awake and she begins to go after what she wants instead of waiting for it to happen.
There are so many great quotes in this book. I was underlining like a madwoman. I don’t usually mark up a book but I felt like I had to for this one.
Here are a few that I either underlined or marked in my Kindle version:
“If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you’ll never be and you need not waste time in trying.”
It was three o’clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock. But sometimes it sets us free.
“Just to love! She did not ask to be loved. It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.”
“But though she was not afraid of death she was not indifferent to it. She found that she _resented_ it; it was not fair that she should have to die when she had never lived. Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by—not because she had no future but because she had no past.”
“I’ve been trying to please other people all my life and failed,” she said. “After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I’ve breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretences and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth! I may not be able to do much that I want to do but I won’t do another thing that I don’t want to do. Mother can pout for weeks—I shan’t worry over it. ‘Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.’”
One of my favorite quotes was: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all of the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear, and it is of all things degrading.”
I have other favorite quotes but they would be spoilers and I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
If I was going to express anything negative about this book it would probably be that the beginning of Valancy’s story, where she is stuck in depression and lack of love from her family, goes on for a bit too long for me. It’s a slog to get through it and I almost thought of putting the book down. I probably wouldn’t have made it through if it hadn’t been for the way Montgomery wove some humor and sarcasm into those chapters.
Some readers have criticized how Valancy acts toward her family after she’s been told she will die soon and, yes, she is harsh to them, but I think we as the reader really need to put ourselves in her shoes. She was treated horribly for 29 years and now that she believes she doesn’t have much longer to live, she’s letting loose. I am pretty sure I’d do the same thing for at least a little while and then I’d tone it down some.
This is a book that could have been filled with heartache and bitterness but instead it is a book full of hope and a type of awakening to how precious life is. To me, the message is that we need to grab ahold of every moment and experience we can because we never know when we will lost the opportunity to do so.
Have you read The Blue Castle? What did you think of it? Are there any other L.M. Montgomery books you enjoyed?
