A really sad story: One time when I was in England I developed this mad craving to read all the Emily of New Moon books, so I went to great trouble to obtain them. As things ended up, I had the first two on loan, and the third one I bought at a charity shop, so I read the first two lickety-split and returned them, at which point my yearning to read Emily’s Quest surpassed all imagining. At this point it was late May, I think. I was into exams and all. And I had the bright idea – being a hardcore delayed gratification girl – of delaying gratification with Emily’s Quest, taking the book with me on the airplane home and reading it then, at which point it would be incredibly satisfying because I would have been craving it all the while in the interim. But by the time the flight home rolled around, my primary emotions were excitement about seeing my family and soul-deep joy at the existence of my hat (oh, my lovely Ascot hat), and I was sort of no longer in the mood to read Emily’s Quest.
Well, never mind. Here we are a year on, and I really enjoyed it a lot this go-round. Teddy’s still boring, bless him. I don’t know why L.M. Montgomery can’t write any interesting romantic leads. All Teddy has going for him is that he draws pretty pictures. Lame. Not that she should have married Dean, but she maybe should have married that author guy who came and proposed to her and hurled a goblet at her.
The other thing I noticed this time – I was saying this to my mum – is that it’s funny how the main plotline throughout the series is Emily’s writing, and that’s the thing that drives everything else really, but she publishes her novel well before the end of the book. The book only ends when she gets together with Teddy (at last). Her man. And I was saying it like those girls in The Ten Commandments. And it’s sooooorta antifeminist, and you’d be hearing me complain about it with much greater anger if not for the fact that I remembered this: If the book had ended after Emily published her book (I don’t approve of the title The Moral of the Rose, by the way), we would never have had all those reviews, and that’s one of my favorite bits in all three books.
And you know what? DEAN PRIEST JUST SUCKS SHIT. The end.