Benjamin LefebvreThe Blythes Are Quoted has been recommended as one of eight “Gifts for Your Bookworm” in Toronto’s Metro News!
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Category: L.M. Montgomery
The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside has been chosen as “Favourite YA Fiction from 2010” by Melanie Fishbane:
Perhaps by saying that this is a new book, we can begin to see it in a new way. Even as possibly one of the first YA novels in Canada?
Read the full post. Visit the book’s official website. Visit the book’s official Facebook page.
There is now additional content related to The Blythes Are Quoted and Rilla of Ingleside on the L.M. Montgomery Research Group website: check it out here! More will be added in early 2011.
The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside is also mentioned in today’s Kitchener–Waterloo Record as well as in today’s Guelph Mercury as a suggested gift book for the holiday season.
This is a new “gift edition” of a novel first published in 1921. It’s the novel that Lucy Maude Montgomery then expected would be the final sequel to Anne of Green Gables. The story concerns Rilla Blythe, the youngest daughter of Anne Shirley, and is set during the First World War. Editions of this novel published in 1976 and 1985 removed about four per cent of the original text, which has now been restored in this volume. Editors of the book are Benjamin Lefebvre, a Waterloo literary scholar, and Andrea McKenzie, a University of Waterloo graduate who is now a director of writing at New York University.
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The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside is mentioned in Deirdre Baker’s article “Holiday Reads: Gift Books for Kids” in yesterday’s Toronto Star:
For a tried and-true wartime novel, especially for L. M. Montgomery fans old or young, look for the new gift edition, restored and unabridged, of Rilla of Ingleside (Viking, 390 pages, $26, ages 10+). This 1921 story of rural Canadian women during World War I is still poignant, funny, sentimental, ironic, suspenseful and heartbreaking. Rilla, the youngst daughter of Anne of Green Gables, develops fortitude, humour and depth as she helps out in war work, adopts an abandoned baby and suffers through her brothers’ sacrifices at the Front.
I’ll be signing copies of Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted as part of the Lucy Maud Montgomery Christmas in Norval, at Crawford’s Bakery, from 1:30 to 3:00 on Saturday, November 27, 2010. Hope to see you there!
The Blythes Are Quoted is now available as a Kindle e-book through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk!
Published today are the paperback version of my edition of L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, and a restored and annotated edition of Montgomery’s First World War novel, Rilla of Ingleside, edited in collaboration with Andrea McKenzie. Both are now available in bookstores across Canada and will soon appear at local libraries. They can also be shipped worldwide if ordered from Amazon.ca or from Penguin Canada.
Included in our edition of Rilla of Ingleside is a bonus section entitled “Canadian Women’s Poetry of the First World War,” which contains the full text of two rarely seen poems that, like the novel, focus on the women at home who watched husbands, sons, brothers, friends, and neighbours go off to fight overseas. L.M. Montgomery’s poem “Our Women” was first published in the collection of poems Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). Also included in this anthology is a poem called “The Young Knights” by Montgomery’s Ontario contemporary, Virna Sheard, whose work is virtually unknown today. Montgomery selected the first stanza of Sheard’s poem as her epigraph to Rilla of Ingleside.
In this exclusive Q&A, I chat with the Indigo Kids’ Editor about my work as editor of The Blythes Are Quoted and co-editor of the new edition of Rilla of Ingleside and my general fascination with all aspects of L.M. Montgomery’s legacy.