“A Heroine from an Asylum.” New York Times Book Review (18 July 1908): 404.

[In the following review, the critic asserts that the character of Anne is unbelievable and spoils the novel.]

A farmer in Prince Edward's Island ordered a boy from a Nova Scotia asylum, but the order got twisted and the result was that a girl was sent the farmer instead of a boy. That girl is the heroine of L. M. Montgomery's story, Anne of Green Gables, (L. C. Page & Co.,) and it is no exaggeration to say that she is one of the most extraordinary girls that she is one of the most extraordinary girls that ever came out of an ink pot.

The author undoubtedly meant her to be queer, but she is altogether too queer. She was only 11 years old when she reached the house in Prince Edward's Island that was to be her home, but, in spite of her tender years, and in spite of the fact that, excepting for four months spent in the asylum, she had passed all her life with illiterate folks, and had had almost no schooling, she talked to the farmer and his sister as though she had borrowed Bernard Shaw's vocabulary, Alfred Austin's sentimentality, and the reasoning powers of a Justice of the Supreme Court. She knew so much that she spoiled the author's plan at the very outset and greatly marred a story that had in it quaint and charming possibilities.

The author's probable intention was to exhibit a unique development in this little asylum waif, but there is not real difference between the girl at the end of the story and the one at the beginning of it. All the other characters in the book are human enough.