Mary Heim

I wrote it down after you got like three sentences in.

All right, Meredith, my second book this week is Dan in Green Gables by Ray Tersiero.

And as I'm sure that you can surmise from the title, this is a modern day reimagining, not retelling, of Anne of Green Gables told through graphic novel format in the coolest and most imaginative way possible.

After an unpredictable life on the road with his mother, 15-year-old Dan Stewart Alvarez has always wanted to settle down, but he didn't imagine that it would ever be like this.

Dropped off in rural Tennessee with practical strangers, his gentle grandmother, and conservative, rough-hewn grandfather.

Here, Dan finds that while he adjusts to the stability of a roof over his head and food on the table, he also must contend with the strangeness of high school, working on the farm, and the toughest part yet, reckoning with his queerness and fully living as himself

in a severe Southern Baptist community.

Dan is faced with the hard reality of having to choose between finding peace in the home that he has always wished for without paying the cost of losing himself entirely.

Meredith, speaking of reading slumps and books to pull you out of a reading slump, I read this one back right after a reading slump.

And I have really found, like I said before, that having a shorter novel, and also this is newer to me in the last couple years, a graphic novel is a really nice way to help me get through the slog of a book hangover, or if I feel like I need a palate cleanser after a book that just hit

so perfectly that I'm like nothing else in the world would compare.

I think graphic novels register just differently enough in my brain that it kind of feels like a hard reset.

It's like I'm still doing the thing that I want to be doing, which is reading, but it is absolutely reading, but it doesn't feel the same as reading only words on a page.

And so it kind of takes the pressure off.

of I have to find the perfect next novel to dig into, and it's like I get this lovely little intermission with a graphic novel.

I get to escape into a world, and this one totally fulfilled that purpose for me.

The illustrations are stunning, and honestly for me, they are what capture the spirit of our Anne with an E the best, is that the colors are a little bit muted, a little bit kind of vintage looking, but it's

feels like it puts you in that Anne place.

The story is one that you can tell was inspired by the original Anne but it diverges and holds its own well enough that it absolutely stands on its own two feet as a story.

Just be prepared going in that it is not going to nod a ton to the original text but if you're willing to let this story play out in its own right I think that there are a lot of readers who