Kilmeny of the Orchard
3.5/5
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Meanwhile, Eric's good friend David who is a renowned throat doctor, comes to the island and visits Eric. He examines Kilmeny, and says that nothing will cure her but an extreme psychological need to speak..."
L. M. Montgomery
L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery (1874-1942) was a Canadian author who published 20 novels and hundreds of short stories, poems, and essays. She is best known for the Anne of Green Gables series. Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) on Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Raised by her maternal grandparents, she grew up in relative isolation and loneliness, developing her creativity with imaginary friends and dreaming of becoming a published writer. Her first book, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 and was an immediate success, establishing Montgomery's career as a writer, which she continued for the remainder of her life.
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Reviews for Kilmeny of the Orchard
223 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Very sweet - a bit too sweet for me. Love at first sight, though it is supported by spending a good deal of time together before they realize/admit their love. Huge, overwhelming, terrible obstacles that just fade away or are very conveniently (or magically) dealt with. And poor Neil - even aside from the author's conviction that his Italian blood controlled his attitude and behavior more than his PEI upbringing. Anne came as an orphan and became family; Neil was born there and never became family. Not worth rereading.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Kilmeny of the Orchard by L.M. Montgomery is a short, overly sweet love story about a young man who falls in love with a mute girl. This girl is Kilmeny, a great beauty but who never learned to speak. Due to the shortness of the book, the characters are never fully developed although we are told many times that the young man is rich and handsome whereas Kilmeny is described as perfection itself (although I found her to be rather naive and boring). They appear to fall in love with each other based solely on looks which makes the whole story seem shallow.To my mind the most interesting character in the story was Neil. He was abandoned as a baby by Italian tinkers and raised along with Kilmeny by her aunt and uncle. He is also in love with her and takes it very badly when she falls in love with the young school master. He is treated much like a hired hand by the people who raised him and they also consider him having ideas above his station when they learn of his feelings for Kilmeny. I felt very sorry for this boy who grew up always being treated as a low class foreigner. I found the whole “disabled girl who is able to miraculously speak perfectly when she needs to” very far-fetched. Unfortunately Kilmeny of the Orchard has neither the charm nor the humor of the Anne books to help the reader accept the improbable plot. This is one book that should have simply stayed up on the shelf.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This novella has at the heart of its conflict an emotional trauma and while there are hints at other obstacles, unlike more modern romantic stories, the path of this love story is not tainted by distrust or misunderstandings. This isn't my favorite story - there's no humor and some unpleasant attitudes towards "foreigners". But there are some moments of sweetness too.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5another deliteful LM Montgomery read - this one definitely quick at 134 pages! started it at the dr's waiting for my appointment and completed by afternoon.
the typical heartwarming human interest story set in the Prince Edward Island community of Lindsay. it begins with Eric Marshall graduation with future planned for family business, circumvented by a friend's request to fill in for just one final month of schoolteaching... a greater plan at work for Eric's future and that of other island residents that include mystery and romance with some serious resistance that needs to be over ruled. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Published in 1910, Kilmeny of the Orchard was L.M. Montgomery's third novel, following upon her beloved children's classic Anne of Green Gables (1908), and its first sequel, Anne of Avonlea (1909). A thoroughly romantic tale, it owes more - in both style and narrative content - to the sentimental novels of the late nineteenth-century, than any of her other works. The tale of Eric Marshall - a wealthy young college graduate who takes a teaching position on Prince Edward Island to oblige a friend, and who falls deeply in love with a beautiful mute girl named Kilmeny Gordon - it follows a fairly standard formula, in which the obstacles to marital bliss are overcome in dramatic and unlikely ways, and the unworthy disappear conveniently from the scene.Beautifully written as it is - and I find it quite an enjoyable book on many levels - Kilmeny of the Orchard is a somewhat problematic text for me, owing to Montgomery's apparent eugenist leanings, manifest in frequent references to the importance of bloodline, and of racial and/or ethnic heritage. Surfacing early on in the story, when Eric discusses issues of heredity with his cousin David Baker, it is a theme most fully explored in the character of Neil Gordon - the Gordon's adopted Italian son. Confronting Neil at one point, Eric thinks: "He was working himself up into a fury again - the untamed fury of the Italian peasant thwarted in his heart's desire. It overrode all the restraint of his training and environment."As much as this unfortunate belief in innate ethnic and national qualities was the product of its time and place, so too was the insistence on the heroine's spotless virtue and complete unworldly innocence. Kilmeny - whose unsurpassed beauty seems to be one of her chief virtues - is described as a child, until Eric's kiss makes her a woman. She is trusting and naive, obedient and utterly passive. Her one moment of self-assertion, which the narrative paints as an act of "selfless love," owes much to a belief in her own unworthiness - that her disability is a "defect."Although Montgomery's casual and oblique references to a eugenist world-view, and chauvinist insistence on passive beauty in a romantic heroine, did prevent me from taking Kilmeny of the Orchard entirely to heart, they did not ruin the book completely. There is still much here to enjoy, from the author's lyrical passages concerning the beauties of Prince Edward Island, to her well-drawn cast of eccentric secondary characters. It is an engaging story, and reads quickly. Unfortunately, it is also somewhat dated, and has none of the transcendence of her greater works.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To help out a friend who has fallen ill, 24 year old Eric takes a job teaching in the sleepy little town of Lindsay. One day he encounters the most beautiful girl he has every seen playing the violin in an old orchard. Her name is Kilmeny Gordon, and she has been unable to speak since birth. As Eric and Kilmeny fall in love, Eric sets out to learn the secrets of her past and make Kilmeny his wife...
This short novella (It's less than 200 pages) was written by L.M Montgomery in 1910. I read it for the first time in 5th grade, when I was devouring everything the author of Anne of Green Gables had ever written. Re-reading it as an adult, I can say that unlike most of Mongomery's works, Kilmeny is definitely a book that shows it's age, not just in the flowery language and various archetypal characters, but also, and unfortunately by the blatant racism shown in the depiction of the novel's villain, an Italian boy born who was raised by Kilmeny's aunt and uncle.
If you can overlook that, it's a short, sweet and quick read, if nothing amazingly profound or memorable. (Except for the climatic scene at the end) - Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This is the story of a substitute teacher at a rural school in Prince Edward Island who meets and falls in love with a mute girl. Other than her dumbness, Kilmeny is perfection itself, unbelievably beautiful (even the hands that help her aunt with 1910 rural housework), incredibly musically talented, and intelligent.GAH! Beauty makes one desirable, Europeans are lower-class, happy, happy, happy endings are guaranteed. Gag me.1 star for the descriptions of PEI because as the author says: Prince Edward Island in the month of June is such a thing as you don’t often see except in happy dreams. I might add that June in Nova Scotia plays out much the same.Read this if: you like sappy romances and are willing to suspend disbelief for both characters and plot; or you feel you must read everything by Lucy Maud Montgomery. (I chose this simply because the title filled the “K” requirement – amazingly difficult to come by – for my A-Z Double Whammy Reading Challenge.)
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5My first read on my Nook! It's fitting that I should plunge into the world of technological books with a title penned long before anyone had dreamed of electronic reading devices. Kilmeny of the Orchard, published in 1910, is a short little novella by L. M. Montgomery, whose depictions of life on Prince Edward Island around the turn of the nineteenth century are poignant, humorous, and beloved by generations of readers. Unfortunately, this story encapsulates all of Montgomery's flaws with very little of her usual insight into human nature. There is a marked ethnocentrism, doubtless natural to her characters and to herself, that cannot but be a little unsettling to a modern reader. And to add to that, Montgomery indulges in long descriptions of her characters' perfect physical beauty and spotless morals. They have not the spice of imperfection and original sin which enlivens and humanizes Montgomery's later creations. There is something sweet about the story, of course — a young man filling in at a remote country school stumbles upon a beautiful young woman in an orchard, mute but for her exquisite violin. Eric Marshall naturally falls in love with Kilmeny Gordon and eventually proposes marriage, but she rejects him because of the burden of her muteness. Nothing, it seems, is really wrong with her voice except a strange repression she inherited from her mother, which can only be cured by some sudden emotional shock... The plot really is a bit forced, and the general sense of is one of contrivance and convenience, with the happy ending hastily procured. Kilmeny of the Orchard is an early work, coming just after Montgomery's first two Anne books. I believe the elements I found objectionable later lost force in her developing imagination and hardly figure at all in her best-loved novels. I try not to judge authors by standards quite foreign to their times and this review is not based on my distaste for any smack of racist thought. Rather, this low rating is for the predictability and oversweetness of the story itself — problems that Montgomery herself no doubt saw and corrected in the novels that followed. She had to learn her art somehow, and if this was her process of trial and error, I can easily endure it for the sake of her other stories, which are among my most beloved books. Still, Kilmeny is best read only by completists; Montgomery has left far superior work to represent her in literature.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This one didn’t live up to the memory I had of reading it as a tween. It was an early book of L.M.M.’s; boy takes over teaching position for sick friend, boy hears beautiful violin playing from an orchard, boy falls rump over teakettle in love with violinist, and is dismayed to find she is a fiercely protected mute girl who has hardly been out of her house since she was small. From then on it is a pitched battle as the hero seeks a way to make Kilmeny whole, and his. In this one the … I don’t want to say racism; perhaps ethnocentricity is a kinder word, or xenophobia… comes out more strongly than in most. It’s a slender book, sweet (as always), and wrapped up a little too neatly (as always) – and without the depth of charm that carries off any faults in the other books.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Kilmeny of the Orchard is the shortest of Montgomery's novels, and I would assert that it was the hardest to read through. Most of the characters were dull, including the main character, despite the interesting change to a focus on a male character rather than a female. He spends so much of his time enraptured by the silent Kilmeny (who, for a third of the book, he has only seen from afar) that he becomes dull to read. Kilmeny's story is interesting, however, as are the turns of plot that lead to the predicament in which her life is begun. Everyone else in the story baffles and few of the characters seem to be natural human beings.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Readable victorian romance.
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Kilmeny of the Orchard - L. M. Montgomery
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