Rainbow Valley completes the shift started in Anne of Ingleside, moving the story away from Anne and her family and focusing instead on the new minister's family, the motherless Merediths. Mr. Meredith is a wonderful preacher, but very absent minded in everyday life. The four Meredith children, Jerry, Faith, Una, and Carl, are at the mercy of their doddering Aunt Margaret, who is really too old and blind to run the manse properly. The Meredith children often go without rather than ask their beloved father for anything, and after their doings scandalize the Glen they form a club for bringing themselves up, "since there is no one else to do it."

Mary Vance is also introduced in this story, and she quickly becomes with the reader what she is to her set: a habit we can't get along without. She is an abused orphan who runs away from her mistress and lands in the manse with the Merediths. Her spicy tongue soon leads to trouble, as little Una believes everything Mary says... even regarding ghost stories and the inevitable cruelty of stepmothers. Throughout the story Mary voices a lot of stark theological misconceptions common to unloved, unwanted children. The children, left to figure out these problems themselves from their innocent observation of the people around them, always do so in a way consistent with their characters. The story is all the stronger for it.

Norman Douglas is another favorite character who makes his first blustering appearance in this story. He is absolutely hilarious, the old pagan. The scene where Faith tells him off is so much fun! And I've always liked the love story subplots in this book — so very different, both sweet and hilarious. Ellen is fascinating. It's interesting that she is proven so right about the Kaiser of Germany, when the men in the story disagree with her political opinions on that score. We get hints of what is coming in Rilla of Ingleside with the Great War. The last chapter has the strongest foreshadowing, with Walter seeing a vision of the Piper who will call the boys of his generation and pipe them round the world.

Rainbow Valley is one of my favorites among the series, despite the fact that Anne is a minor character. The Merediths are lovable and their adventures fresh and entertaining. I used to think that Anne of Green Gables and Rilla of Ingleside were my top favorites, but I'm not so sure that Rainbow Valley isn't among them after all. Funny, fresh, and written at the top of Montgomery's form, this is a delightful story I love to revisit. Highly recommended! ( )

The less these books are about Anne, the less I like them.

After having read through the trials and tribulations of Anne as she grew up, married, had children, made a life and a home, Rainbow Valley was a little startling in its pure concentration on the kids. Suddenly it was all nightmares and bosom friends and school tribulations again, with only glances at Anne. I missed her. Again, it was all dear and sweet, never sticky-icky – those children were not all angels, though the Blythes and their friends the Merediths were uniformly good-hearted … but … I wanted Anne, I guess. ( )

I must confess to being a little disappointed when I realized that this book primarily concerns the Blythes' new neighbors, the widowed Rev. Meredith's children. Of course the Blythes are their playmates in idyllic Rainbow Valley, but I didn't take to them nearly as much because they're too far removed from Anne.

Nevertheless, they have some riotous adventures, often inadvertantly at their father's expense, and the horror of the community seems to be directly in inverse proportion to their good intentions. The adventures snowball until the denoument, when all the situations are smoothed out in a satisfactory way. But the happy ending is bittersweet, especially as dark foreshadowing crops up more and more as the book progresses. ( )

In reading this book, I finally felt like Montgomery had achieved what she set out to accomplish from the first "Anne" book: to weave together a tale of childlike innocence and romantic entanglement. This is done so much better here than it was in the character of young Anne because the two concepts are wisely separated and presented through the story of an endearing young family of children and their absent-minded but easy-to-love widower father. In leaving the romance to the adults and letting the children be children, Montgomery finally achieves what seems like an honest and realistic presentation of hew new characters.

On the other hand, Anne herself plays an almost marginal role in the story, being reinjected almost as the presence of the novelist herself, commenting on her sympathies with the other characters. I found her far less likeable in this story than in any of the others, for she seemed largely to have lost her dreaminess in the drudgery of listening to idle adult gossip and engaged in few, if any, other activities throughout the book. It also bothered me that in one scene, she appeared to identify with the imaginative flights of fancy of another character moreso than with her own emotionally wounded daughter.

However, Anne's strongest moment in this book is to provide a sense of authorial voice to counter the gossip that so mundanely weighs both the narrative style of this book and the lives of the townspeople down. I was struck over and over in reading this story with the horrifying hypocrisy of the churchgoers and their altogether weak grasp of the theology the Presbyterian church they attended would have, or should have, been teaching. As a mostly life-long Presbyterian myself, I saw the same problems in this turn-of-the-20th-century novel that I see plaguing the mainstream Presbyterian church, and others, today: a sense of tradition, pragmatism, and public opinion prevailing over an actual understanding and practising of Biblical doctrine and wisdom. I felt often in reading this book that if this were meant to be a satire of "the way things are but should not be," the writing was not quite sly enough to pull it off--until Anne made an impassioned speech setting herself apart from such problems. Unfortunately for the characters in the story, her voice of reason didn't really change anything much, a problem that also resonates for many of us who are Christians today. Fortunately, however, Montgomery wraps us ever more fabulously in the cloak of innocence surrounding the Meredith family and how they manage to muddle along just fine, in spite of the ugliness around them. ( )