More Short Stories from L.M. Montgomery

More Short Stories from L.M. Montgomery is a second round of early magazine tales from the author of Anne of Green Gables, read slowly for sleep.

Long before her novels, Montgomery paid the bills by selling short fiction to magazines across Canada and the United States, hundreds of them over her career. Their plots are small by design: a courtship that hangs on one letter, a feud between neighbors, an aunt with one surprise left in her, a homesick girl on a farm by the shore. Most of them end kindly.

She wrote the country she knew: red roads and spruce woods, kitchens with the kettle on, a village that has your business by suppertime. Some stories head west instead, to a prairie town or a homestead out in Saskatchewan. Nothing much is at stake beyond a marriage, a mended grudge, or a bit of wounded pride, which is what makes them such easy company late at night.

If the first collection went down well, this one has the same warmth. The stories share no characters and no running thread, so you can begin anywhere and stop anywhere. It sits with the domestic short fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Douglas Wiggin, and with Montgomery's own Chronicles of Avonlea.

The reading stays low and unbothered from the first story to the last. Start one, and the next will probably be under way by the time sleep arrives.