If Anne Shirley was a Teenager in 2015

CANNONBALL!

It’s always a bit scary reading an adaptation or re-imagining of source material that’s important to you. I loooooooove the Anne of Green Gables series and have loved it ever since my grandparents gave me a box set when I was a little girl. There is serious magic in those books and characters. AoGG is for me what the Harry Potter series is to teenagers and twentysomethings today. So when I saw that Andi Teran had written a modern-day take on Anne and company, I was both excited and nervous. It takes some serious guts to take a story beloved by millions and make it your own.

Luckily, I can say that Ana of California is definitely worth a read. Not everything from the original AoGG universe is going to translate realistically to a modern context, but Teran kept the spirit of the original. Ana (like fauna, not Anna like banana) Cortez is a 15-year-old kid who has been bounced around the LA foster system for a decade. Unfortunately, she keeps pissing off her terrible foster parents by speaking up when the kids are treated badly and now has nowhere to go besides a group home or up north to a small farm that needs a helping hand. Obviously she chooses the farm even though she’s never grown anything and doesn’t even know the difference between some of the vegetables. At the farm, we get to meet all the old characters, Diana, Gilbert, Matthew, Marilla, and even Rachel Lynde, in their updated modern versions. Some of the major themes of AoGG are cleverly modernized by Teran. In the original Anne experiences prejudice because she’s an orphan and in AoC Ana has to deal with assumptions and prejudice based on her Mexican heritage. Anne is an imaginative storyteller and Ana is an imaginative artist. And anyone who has ever read anything by L. M. Montgomery knows that nature is one of her focuses. By choosing to make the setting a farm surrounded by the beauty of northern CA, Teran cleverly pays homage.

Not everything updated perfectly. I really missed the closeness of the Matthew/Anne relationship and the main love story in AoC fell a little flat for me. Still, AoC is a fun read with memorable characters and solid writing. Teran more than makes up for those misses by making the Diana character more complex and giving the Marilla character a fun subplot. I would highly recommend this enjoyable book for anyone into young adult literature, people looking to diversify their reading, or fans of the original AoGG series.