I liked this a lot. There were some characters I wish there had been more depth on, like Brian, but overall I liked the range of characters. I could have done without the last chapter, however; the Sams were my least favorite pair (in terms of their reconciliation) and the last paragraph left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Overall, though, I really liked it! ( )

L.M. Montgomery was very very good at several things, and one of those was keeping a secret from her readers, building suspense until she finally decides to reveal all – which is always done in a satisfying manner. And she never does it better than in A Tangled Web – through the petty jealousies and deep passions and squabbles and allegiances of the tale of the Darks and the Penhallows runs one of the best tantalizers I've ever seen: why did Joscelyn leave Hugh the night of their wedding and refuse to ever return to him? I don’t know if the reality of what happened quite lives up to the anticipation – but it’s believable, in its way, and in order for the situation to be resolved requires some excellent plotting. And the anticipation is delicious. I love the character Oswald Dark – what a being he is. Were I to indulge in fan-fiction about L.M.M., I think I’d center on him. But … there is a fly in the ointment, which I'd forgotten until I came to it - how could I forget that last line of the book? Avoid if possible. It’s an unnecessary stain on a lovely book, and a true sign that while a lot of things have changed for the worse since L.M.M. wrote, not everything has. Even given the fly, this is one of my favorites among L.M.M.'s books. ( )

A Tangled Web relates a year's events in a large family clan around 1930-ish - events caused by the prospect of potentially inheriting Aunt Becky's jug. The Dark-family jug has assumed coveted heirloom status (despite its actual lack of worth) and as the book notes "several things happened in the Dark and Penhallow clan because of it [and] several other things did not happen."
It is a tangled web of a family - the much intermarried Darks and Penhallows - and a tangled web of a story, concerned with multiple family members and generations - from Brian (an illegitate, orphaned and neglected child), to 18-year-old Gay (in love for the first time), to Hugh and Joscelyn (married 10 years ago for 3 hours before Joscelyn left him) to spinster-Margaret (overworked and overlooked, with seemingly unattainable dreams), to the cousins Big Sam and Little Sam... and that still leaves out several main characters who are involved in or just observing the family sagas. Gossip and speculation, affairs, engagements and break-ups, feuds and arguments, mistakes and accidents, sorrows and heartbreak... Montgomery portrays a very believable family with a variety of human foibles, likable despite their flaws, and tells her story insight, satire, wit, humour and emotion - not to mention some especially clever or memorable moments. I'm rarely a fan of multiple perspectives but here it works very well; shifting from one storyline to another is refreshing, turning simple (and potentially predictable) stories into something more complex and interesting.

A Tangled Web reminded me both of The Blue Castle and the Emily books (which I love); there was something delightful and comforting about the style, the observations and the world. The story wasn't as predictable as I expected, and was much more amusing and engaging than I had anticipated, too. It is some years since I read most of Montgomery's novels, as a child and a young teenager. I wish I had read this sooner (why didn't I???), but at the same time, I'm glad I was able to read and enjoy it for the first time as an adult.

(I will admit I looked at one line and had such a strong sense of de ja vu that I googled it. It is also said by a character in Emily's Quest... ) ( )

I’ve tried to read this book several times before and for whatever reason, it just wasn’t the right time and I ended up getting stuck at different parts each time. This time went well, though. I simply tore right through it.
The characters in this novel are both enchanting and enraging. They were simultaneously delightful and infuriating which, while it had the potential to be irritating was really quite genius. I loved the characters while feeling them human enough to enjoy. I got attached to most of the characters (at least those to whom the reader is meant to become attached) and found my favorites among them.

What I loved most about this story was how it wasn’t just about one character. With stories that focus on one character primarily one can easily lose interest in the novel because the main character is somehow dissatisfying. With a book like this, if I didn’t like a character, I could just wait until the later half of the chapter and then be able to read about a different character.

I really think this book excelled because of the style. Rather than it being a series of vignettes about one character, she explores into the lives of many, and if there’s anything L.M. Montgomery did particularly well, it was write short stories. Once I finally got through it, I really enjoyed the stories within and I think the ending was very sweet without being too overdone. ( )

Canada's L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) is certainly a contender for my favorite author of all time if not the title holder. She is best known for her popular book, Anne of Green Gables as well as over twenty other novels and a large quantity of short stories and poems. I got acquainted with her as a young girl when my mother who had loved her books passed them down to me. I own every book she's ever written and I have the habit of reading them over and over again even though I own thousands of other books of which I am also fond. Nothing can touch L.M. Montgomery's writing for its ability to "take me away."

A Tangled Web, written in 1931, is the only novel that L.M. Montgomery wrote specifically for adults. Her other books are geared toward a more youthful readership though they seem ageless to me. In the early 1900s on Prince Edward Island where the author was born and raised and lived into her adulthood the strict Presbyterian background of its many Scottish settlers colored the morés and attitudes and behavior of the majority of the people. Married to a Presbyterian minister herself, Montgomery never-the-less often pokes gentle, good-natured fun at the stiff, thrifty, no-nonsense, judgmental, Bible reading, God fearing and church-going populace. Religion, in the time and place in which she wrote, was the backbone of everyday life. Propriety was ever topmost in a person's mind, governing one's conduct and defining the parameters of decency. Neighbors watched and judged each other with an eagle eye and God watched everyone. In the small farm communities where everyone not only knew everyone else but also all of their relatives for several generations back, one false step could condemn an entire clan to gossip and disgrace for decades. Good breeding, good manners and behavior that was nothing "out of the ordinary" were the safeguards of a peaceful life. Gossip and the opinion of society had an iron hand on the life choices of any particular person and many a person went to their graves disappointed by life from bending to public opinion rather than following their heart. Nothing was worse than to be gossiped over and judged inferior before the community. Victorian values and the peculiarities of their sexual inhibitions made life not only gentle and sensitive but repressive and naïve. The new wave of Edwardian hunger for expression was only beginning to make inroads into the prim and proper manners of the time.

It is against the backdrop of this climate of naïvté that the plot of A Tangled Web unfolds. Bear in mind that this tale is not told from the perspective of some student of a historical period through the scope of a backward glance but is communicated to us from one who lived in the times described among people like the ones it characterizes. If you happen to like the flavor of Victorian/Edwardian times or of old fashioned country life you can't find a better window on those worlds.

A Tangled Web at first glance may not seem all that different from the books that Montgomery wrote for younger readers. Indeed, today it is marketed and sold right along side of her other books in the children's section of book stores. L.M. Montgomery would probably be aghast. It contains swearing (oh horrors!), romantic indiscretions, talk of fallen women and illegitimate children. It shows adults caught up in the nets of avarice and infidelity. There is only one child among its many characters and that little boy a tragic and pathetic child to rival any of the creations of Dickens. That being said, if the modern reader is looking to this "adult" novel for explicit realism on a par with modern sensibilities (or the lack there of) they will be disappointed. Montgomery was a liberated woman for her times in the sense that she was educated and outspoken, she had her own substantial income, and was very definitely her own person but she was also a product of the times in which she lived. While she was content to make gentle jibes at the morals and ethics of the times she was quite bound by them herself and a delicate, modest and pious atmosphere permeates her writing. She loved the Island and most of its people, taking the beautiful and satisfying along with the rigid and confining. That is a part of the charm of her books.

I really enjoyed reading this book. In fact I couldn't put it down. I whistled through its 324 pages in a single day. This is almost like a soap opera in that there are numerous characters, all related in some way and their lives are a tangled web of intrigues, love affairs, heart aches and scandals. Some of the characters are comical, some serious but all seem so real. Montgomery's best talent is that of characterization. I think she's a genius. In this novel she weaves the lives of her characters together with amazing skill, with complicated plot lines and lots of mystery holding together the threads of romance, tragedy and comedy. Anyone who has read any of her other books will know that she always brings her main characters to the brink of heartbreaking disaster before she waves her wand over the plot and sorts everything out in the end. I've never been quite able to figure out how she manages to suck me in because I always know its going to turn out alright but still I furiously turn the pages with bated breath praying that the hero or heroine survives the plot's pitfalls. How anything can be so transparent yet so engrossing is beyond me...but that's the magic of L.M. Montgomery.

This book concerns two PEI clans, the Darks and the Penhallows who have intermarried for generations. "Most of the Darks had been née Penhallow and most of the Penhallows had been née Dark, save a goodly minority who had been Darks née Dark or Penhallows née Penhallow. In three generations sixty Darks had married to sixty Penhallows. The resultant genealogical tangle baffled everybody except Uncle Pippin. There was really nobody for a Dark to marry except a Penhallow and nobody for a Penhallow to marry except a Dark. Once, it had been said, they wouldn't take anybody else. Now, nobody else would take them. At least, so Uncle Pippin said."

The story opens with Aunt Becky Dark, née Penhallow, unofficial head of the clan, upon the doctor's pronouncement that she is not likely to live much longer, calling the entire clan together for one of her famous levees. (One of the things I love about L.M Montgomery's writing is her use of words like levee.) The purpose of the levee will be to decide who shall inherit the most prized of all the family heirlooms, the Old Dark Jug.

"It must be admitted frankly that Aunt Becky was not particularly beloved by her clan. She was too fond of telling them what she called the plain truth. And, as Uncle Pippin said, while the truth was all right, in its place, there was no sense in pouring out great gobs of it around where it wasn't wanted." This being said, not one of the clan missed the levee because every one of them coveted the Old Dark Jug. To own it would be the highest form of prestige, not so much for its monetary value but for its history, mystery and romance. Besides Darks thought Darks should have it while Penhallows thought it belonged with them.

Everyone went to the levee with a great deal of curiosity...and also with a great deal of dread. At age 85 Aunt Becky knew too much about everybody and delighted in bringing out the clan's dirty laundry for a thorough airing. The levee, at which Aunt Becky read her scandalous self-penned obituary and her Last Will and Testament dispersing her worldly possessions not to those who wanted them but rather to those to whom it seemed fitting based on Aunt Becky's rather poisonous but wise sense of humor, was to go down in clan history as the pivotal point in the lives of most everyone present at it. As it turns out, on that day, no one found out who was to have the jug after all. Aunt Becky announced that she was placing it in under the custodial care of one of their number and that she would record her directions for the disposal of the jug and place it in a sealed envelope to be opened one year from the last day of the next October. She would not reveal precisely what criteria would be used in selecting the recipient but she did make a long pointed list of behaviors that would cause exclusion. It would not go to anyone unmarried or anyone who had been married too much, nor to anyone who quarrels or wastes his time fiddling. It would not go to anyone addicted to swearing or drinking. No one extravagant, untruthful or dishonest would have it. It would not be given to anyone who had no bad habits or who never did anything disgraceful. It would not go to anyone who begins things without finishing them or who writes bad poetry. Finally, it could not go to anyone who did not live on the Island. Aunt Becky dies the next week.

What follows is a complicated tangle of individual character studies and intertwining plot threads that are by turns humorous and sad, prosaic and romantically poetic. Over the course of the following year and a half the family members of the Clan Dark-Penhallow impact on each other through changes in their behaviors that they make in order to be in the running for the Old Dark Jug. Gears turn effecting other gears and many an unexpected twist in Life's fabric ensues until the designated All Souls Day when the jug's fate is learned. The plot is clever and engaging and even while the reader surely guesses the outcome of most of the plot threads, Montgomery's methods of accomplishing the outcomes, tastily convoluted as they are, keep the pages turning like a brisk autumn wind.

Like all of Montgomery's novels this one is filled with rich descriptions and evocative and colorful language. Like all her work it is a veritable storehouse of Victorian and Edwardian sensibility, drama, and history as well as provincial life in all senses of the word. Her characters, in this novel as in all her others, practically leap from the pages, so fully realized are each and every one of them. Why then, you may ask, have I seen fit to award it only three stars? Racism. Montgomery exhibits a brand of racism so self-assured and ingrained that the author, a well educated, self-professing Christian of considerable sensitivity and profound empathy gives it not a second thought when she not once but twice, against not only one race but two, makes grossly disparaging and humiliating comments under the guise of humor.

The offending sentences are short. They figure but slightly in the book's overall character. The first one occurs early in the first chapter. It is a slur against First Nation people, probably the Mi'kmaqs (Micmac). In describing the character, Little Sam, a retired sailor, Montgomery says, "He had a harmless hobby of collecting skulls from the old Indian graveyard down at Big Friday Cove and ornamenting the fence of his potato plot with them." I was willing to forgo slapping this book shut on the spot because I have personally read many a microfilmed newspaper story about the settlers in my own home town who were fond of doing the very same thing back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I didn't have a problem with Montgomery creating a character who thoughtlessly desecrated the graves of native people...it makes for a realistic aspect of a character portrayal for a person from that time and place. What bothered me was her insertion of the word harmless in the sentence. This was a value judgment of her own and not part of the characterization of Little Sam. This is an author who uses family graveyards as a device in nearly every one of her stories. She was well aware of their spiritual, historical, sentimental and emotional value to human beings. Whether it was an attitude shared by "everybody" at the time or not, this does not excuse L.M. Montgomery. This is a woman who was known for bucking the status quo, a person who sympathized with and spoke out on behalf of the rights of laboring children and the plight of women. Racism, whatever else it may be, is a personal, individual matter. L.M. Montgomery, regardless of the prevailing attitudes of her day, was more than capable of understanding that digging up the skulls of deceased human beings and using them as ornaments for a fence is not under any circumstances a "harmless" act. She would have abhorred using the skulls of white people. She portrays it here as just another spot of color in the fabric of a character because she personally refuses to make the intellectual leap for her own racist reasons. It stuck in my craw, but never-the-less, I read on for 276 more pages, thoroughly enjoying the book.

You know that feeling, when you've just read the last sentence of a really good book, one in which you've thoroughly immersed yourself, that satisfied sort of glow you have as you close the book and hold it in your hands for a minute, thinking, "Ah, now there was a good book." Well, my dear little escapist heart was flushed with that feeling as I got to the last three sentences of this book, when out of nowhere, Montgomery walloped me up 'side the head with the swing of a bat that would have saved Mighty Casey's reputation but which severely damaged hers.

During the course of the story two retired bachelors, a couple of old sea dogs, who had been friends and room mates for years quarreled over a small white alabaster statue of the nude figure of the goddess Aurora that one of them had won as a minor prize at a raffle. The winner had nonchalantly placed it on the mantle piece, attaching no especial importance to it. He would have gladly discarded the cheap little bit of kitsch....that is until his room mate demanded that he get rid of it because it was indecent and obscene. Tempers flared and a life-long friendship ended when the two stubborn men locked horns and one of them moved out in righteous indignation. This story is the last one in the book that gets resolved after the disposition of the Old Dark Jug. Its resolution is completely absurd in keeping with the two curmudgeonly old gents we have come to know. It turns out that the offending owner of the naked statue has resolved to make it easier on his old friend by painting the white statue bronze. In his mind this is like covering her up. His friend sees it in quite a different way as he says in the very last three sentences of the book. "Then you can scrape it off again," said Big Sam firmly. "Think I'm going to have an unclothed nigger sitting up there? If I've gotter be looking at a naked woman day in and day out, I want a white one for decency's sake."

Titter, titter. Isn't he a funny old salt? I was flabbergasted. My beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery, sensitive, romantic creator of many of my favorite dream worlds, chose those three sentences for her conclusion?! Excruciating! Unthinkable! Couldn't she have found anything else to say to resolve the old tiff between these men? Didn't she have anything else in her bag of writing tricks? How could someone as creative and intelligent and sensitive as my dear L.M. be so irresponsible with the future? How could she let this rank racism lie there in the pages of her beautiful story so that years after her own passing it might be stepped upon by an unsuspecting reader and burst like a tragically forgotten land mine. How could she be so callous and so smugly sure of her privileged position that she felt comfortable enough to glibly and publicly pass racism off as humor? Whether or not these two characters would have likely thought and spoken in the way she has them doing in the book is beside the point. I believe that Montgomery thought this ignorant prejudiced character's distaste for "niggers" (not to mention his misogyny) was as "harmless" as the skulls on the potato fence and therefore thought it added a great little humorous splash of detail to a colorfully realistic portrait. Throughout the previous chapters she had painted these two men as lovable old salt of the earth types. The language here is delivered with the thought that it will be received as humor. The humor is in the ridiculous notion that the paint would cover the nude form up but it is raised to another level of hilarity when it has the effect of turning the alabaster statue into a "nigger." This humorous device was designed to make these old men seem all the more foolish and thus all the more endearing and L.M. Montgomery used it as such because the racism inherent in the remark was irrelevant to her. The colloquial mind set of her character was able to seem genuinely funny to her because the racist thinking behind it did not matter to her in the least.

I collect antique glassware. Sometimes a very beautiful old piece that would be worth thousands of dollars will be discovered to have a little chip in it or a crack or some other small damage that renders it worthless in terms of its value as a collectible piece of art. It may still be beautiful and it may still be serviceable but a chip is a chip and a crack is a crack and that's that. This story about the ramifications of a precious heirloom is a delightful bit of antique writing...but with that unsightly crack of racism running through it, I'm afraid its value is markedly depreciated. ( )