**edited 12/04/13 
 L.M. Montgomery was the favourite author of my childhood. I owned every book she ever wrote and read and reread those poor paperbacks until their spines were bent and broken and worn. But when I was younger, there was one book of the Anne series that tended to lie lonesome and dusty and almost pristine on my shelf: Rilla of Ingleside. Most of the Anne books are sweet and in some sense unchallenging as we watch the beautiful,spirited, and entertaining girl gain wisdom and poise. But Rilla is an abrupt shift. It is a story about war, about the women who are left behind and must deal each day with the terrible fear that the men they love will never come home. It is a coming-of-age story, but rather than tell the story of an orphan finding a home, it shows us how the horrors of war, even when taking place continents away, can reshape a vain, selfish child into a woman. In fact, I think that reason that it lay forlorn on my shelf is why, looking back, it is now one of my favorite Montgomery books: it invokes a pathos that not even the author herself was fully aware of when she wrote it. 
 ...And that's all I'm going to post here. 
 The rest of my (rather verbose) review is posted over here at Booklikes. 
 Why? Because I disapprove of GoodReads' new policy of censorship.