Talking about Anne of Green Gables
Questions for reading it as a family: openers to get everyone talking, real questions with no right answers, and something to do together. First time? Here's how we'd run a family book club →
Warming up
Easy openers. Anyone at the table can answer these, including the youngest.
Anne renames every place she loves: the Lake of Shining Waters, the White Way of Delight. What's one ordinary place in your life that deserves a better name, and what would you call it?
Which of Anne's disasters is the funniest: the currant wine, the green hair, the mouse in the pudding sauce, or walking the ridgepole?
The real conversation
Pick two or three, not all of them. A good conversation about one question beats getting through the list. Parents answer too, honestly.
Marilla and Matthew asked for a useful boy and got Anne instead. When has something in your life turned out better because it wasn't what you asked for?
Anne talks more than anyone in Avonlea, and Matthew talks least, and the two of them understand each other best of all. How does that work?
Anne cracks her slate over Gilbert's head for one word, then holds the grudge for years. When does refusing to forgive someone stop protecting you and start costing you?
Anne is in the depths of despair before lunch and back to radiant by supper. Is feeling everything that strongly a gift or a burden, or does it depend on who's asking?
Marilla loves Anne long before she ever says it out loud. How can you tell? How do people in this family say things without saying them?
The big one
At the end, Anne gives up her scholarship to stay at Green Gables with Marilla, and calls the narrowed road a bend, not an ending. Was she right? What would you give up for a person, and is there anything that shouldn't be given up?
Do it together
Rename your world
Take a walk together along a route you all know (to school, to the store, around the block) and give every place on it an Anne-style name. The rule: each name must be more beautiful than the thing deserves, and once a place is named, that's what your family calls it from now on. Draw the map when you get home and put it on the fridge.
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More discussion guides: the family book club →