Or can they?
The first adaptation I read was ANNE OF WEST PHILLY (Little, Brown, 256 pp., paperback, $12.99, ages 8 to 12), written by Ivy Noelle Weir and illustrated by Myisha Haynes, in which Anne is a brown-skinned eighth grader who finds a home with the siblings Matthew and Marilla in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. I appreciated the nod to the White Way of Delight (the flowery canopy of “snowy fragrant bloom” that captivates Anne in Avonlea), reimagined here as an unexpectedly beautiful graffiti-embellished alleyway. I was less impressed by the way Anne aids Diana’s little sister by icing her mildly sprained ankle — in the original, Anne heroically nurses Minnie through a near-fatal attack of croup — and by the treatment of the slate-breaking scene, now a single anticlimactic slap. Still, despite references to Instagram and quinoa, and robotics competitions instead of poetry recitations, “Anne of West Philly” is a dutiful tribute. It reminded me of a gluten-free, nondairy, keto version of an old-fashioned recipe. I didn’t miss white Anne, but I did miss wacky Anne.
I was prepared for more of the same with Kathleen Gros’s graphic novel ANNE: An Adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables” (Sort Of) (Quill Tree, 304 pp., paperback, $13.99, ages 8 to 12). Like Weir, Gros incorporates the classic moments: Anne confronts Rachel, falls into a river, breaks a board over Gilbert’s head. But it’s a looser interpretation, focused less on plot than self-discovery. The book’s emotional core rests on two big realizations: Anne is an artist (as she learns by joining the school’s zine club), and she likes girls.
Gird your loins, traditionalists, because the queerification of Anne is in full flower. Much has been written about repressed desire in the series at least since 2000, when Laura Robinson’s paper “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Books” sparked a mini-furor at an academic conference. It’s no stretch: Even casual fans have to raise an eyebrow at Anne’s flamboyant passion for Diana and her scornful attitude toward marriage. “I love Diana so, Marilla,” Anne declares. “I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband — I just hate him furiously.”
In “Anne of West Philly,” Weir tiptoes so lightly around this theme, young readers could well miss it. Gros, by contrast, puts the gay stuff front and center: Anne gets a butch haircut, holds hands with Diana at a concert and asks her diary, “What does it mean when your best friend (who you kind of think you have a crush on) says she turned down the boy who asked her to the dance???” The story culminates with the girls kissing.
If Gros’s is among the gayer adaptations out there, so is the Y.A. novel ANNE OF GREENVILLE (Melissa de la Cruz Studio, 294 pp., $18.99, ages 14 to 18), by Mariko Tamaki — more a playful riff than a retelling — in which Anne is the half-Japanese, disco-loving, “deliriously queer” adopted daughter of two moms. After the family moves to the conservative small town of Greenville, Anne encounters a scary nativist clique and a thorny love triangle involving two girls, Berry (as in Diana Barry) and Gilly. Tamaki’s nods to the original have a postmodern flair. When Gilly calls Anne “Carrots” (an unforgivable insult in Montgomery’s version), Anne responds: “Carrots? … That’s what you got?”
Source: NY Times
