Red-headed snippet

When I was seven, my grandma sent me a copy of Anne of Green Gables.  In the mail!  This was at least a decade before we could sit in the comfort of our own homes, go clickety-click-click, wait a few days, and POOF!  have a book magically appear in the mailbox.  This was huge.

Except that the book had creepy cover.  Not cutesy, like this one.  Mine was a live action shot from the PBS mini-series; coal black except for a scraggly looking red-headed girl, clutching a super-ugly carpet bag.  It looked like a V. C. Andrews' book cover.

I tried valiantly to read it once or twice, but just couldn't hack it.  The paragraphs were so long, it seemed, and by the time I got to the end of the page I couldn't remember what I had read.  A few years later, though, grandma sent me the rest of the series and I gave Anne another whirl.  It was love at second sight.

Anne is a weird girl.  She's naive and high-strung, and she causes no end of trouble to her adopted family (a prickly spinster sister and her kindly bachelor brother).  Anne's desperate to be raven-haired and ivory-complected, and ends up staining her nose red and dyeing her hair green.  And yet, Anne is lovable and charming, in that Canadian-orphan-at-the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century sort of way.  It's a sweet book, and there's good news for you series-lovers out there: L.M. Montgomery wrote eight books about this red-headed snippet.