Anne of Green Gables

The pitch

Elderly siblings send for an orphan boy to help on their Prince Edward Island farm and receive, by mistake, a red-haired girl with an imagination the size of the island — who proceeds to transform every life she touches, her own included. It is one of the best-loved books ever written, and it earns every bit of it.

What to know

The chapters are long but nearly self-contained, each one a fresh scrape or triumph, which makes the book friendlier than its page count suggests. The vocabulary runs rich, exactly as Anne would want it, so it suits strong readers from grade 5, and it reads aloud beautifully if you can do the voices. If your child knows the Netflix series, the book is sunnier; the show’s darker inventions aren’t in here.

Life when written

Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island was a world of family farms, red dirt roads, one-room schoolhouses, and church socials — and she knew Anne’s situation from the inside, having been raised in Cavendish by her stern grandparents after her mother died. Orphans really were sent out to farm families expecting a working boy, exactly as the Cuthberts do. Avonlea is fiction, but its geography — the shore, the woods, the neighbors who know everything — is her own childhood, lovingly mapped.