Anne of West Philly by Ivy Noelle Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really have found this run of reimagined classics in comic form (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: A Modern Graphic Retelling of Little Women and The Secret Garden on 81st Street: A Modern Retelling of the Secret Garden) infinitely charming things and Anne of West Philly is no exception. The premise is simple: this is a modern day retelling (and in many senses a reimagining) of Anne of Green Gables. As with any adaptation, and moreso with an adaptation of something so firmly rooted as Anne of Green Gables, decisions are made and conversations had. I’m not especially familiar with the original text so can’t quite comment on the efficacy or indeed the accuracy of those decisions but what I can comment on is Anne of West Philly: it’s a delight.
Anne is fostered by brother and sister Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. Anne is an exuberant soul, a storm of personality, and yet she’s also a person who’s figuring out who she is in the world. She makes mistakes and is human and it’s all done so gently and kindly that you kind of know what the outcome is going to be but you don’t mind it because it’s all lovely. Good things can happen in the world, says this book, and yes, there’s not much tension about it, but it’s just infinitely charming and so you don’t care one bit.
I’d have welcomed a little more time to be spent during certain moments. There’s an instance, early on, where Anne (with an e) goes into the back alley behind her new home and discovers a world full of colour and plants and art sprayed onto the walls. This is her “White Way of Delight” moment, as in the original text. It’s in this space that she discovers a mural of somebody who looks a little bit like her and looks up to it in delight. It’s such a beautiful moment but one that we don’t really return to or explore elsewhere in the rest of the book and I thought that was a little bit of a shame. Houses can become homes and strangers can become family but there’s something particularly profound and resonant about finding yourself in a place as if you were meant to be there all along.
One of the decisions here is to make Anne a coder and I loved that very much. I think there’s something really interesting in thinking about coding as a form of language and for a character who I’ve (whether rightfully or wrongly) always associated with literature and storytelling, it felt like an excellent fit. There’s a lot to love here and it’s all just so nicely done. But that’s a characteristic of this series as a whole and I’ve loved every inch of it. Reimagining classics is hard but doing it with love and with heart seems the key.
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Daisy May Johnson 