Verwandte Artikel zu Anne of a Different Island

Anne of a Different Island - Softcover

Kantra, Virginia

 
9780593816493: Anne of a Different Island
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593816498 ISBN 13: 9780593816493
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A woman learns to be the heroine of her own life in this heartfelt novel inspired by Anne of Green Gables by New York Times bestselling author Virginia Kantra.

She believed life could follow a plotline—until the story she was living unraveled.

Anne Gallagher has always lived by the book. Anne of Green Gables, that is. Growing up on Mackinac Island, she saw herself as her namesake: the same impulsive charm, the same wild imagination, even the same red hair (dyed, but still). She followed in Anne Shirley’s fictional footsteps, chasing dreams of teaching and writing, and falling for her very own storybook hero.

But when a string of real-life plot twists—a failing romance, a fight with the administration, and the sudden death of her beloved father—pulls her back to the island she once couldn’t wait to leave, Anne is forced to face a truth no story ever prepared her for. Sometimes, life doesn’t follow a script.

Back in the house she grew up in, Anne must confront her past and the people she left behind, including Joe Miller, the boy who once called her “The Pest.” It’s time to figure out what she wants and rewrite her story to create her own happy ending. Not the book version. The real one.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Virginia Kantra

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Anne

April 2022

"Name?" The barista's marker poised above the cup.

"Anne. With an e," I added.

I waited for the answering glimmer that would identify the girl at the airport coffee shop as a kindred spirit. Any sort of recognition, I told myself, would be a sign. A connection, like a message from my dad.

When I was eight, my father brought a copy of Anne of Green Gables home from the library's used-book sale. I'd been sick for a week, some kind of flu that left me confined to the house, antsy and bored. My easygoing father was useless in the sickroom, my mother said. (Uselessness, in her eyes, was a sin, like greed or envy or forgetting to take off your shoes in the house.) He'd stood there awkwardly in the door of my small room, his big carpenter's hand wrapped around a battered green paperback with a red-haired girl on the cover, and I'd been overwhelmed with love.

He was not a reader, my dad. But somehow he'd understood (or been told by my English teacher, Mrs. Powell) that I needed Anne Shirley in my life. She became my fictional best friend, my inspiration, reassurance that a strange girl with a big imagination and a bigger mouth could find her place in the world.

Of course, I could never truly be Anne. I wasn't Canadian, for one thing. Or a natural redhead. Or an orphan. But as soon as I turned eighteen, I had an Anne Shirley quote tattooed on my right arm, paid for with savings from working in my mother's fudge shop over the summer: Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.

"Looks like a mistake to me," my mother said when I'd proudly revealed my new ink.

The barista scrawled on the cup. "Anything else?"

Her voice broke into my memories. I blinked, abruptly recalled to the present. Around us, the terminal rang with footsteps, rattling wheels, and echoing flight announcements bouncing off the cavernous ceiling. "Oh. No. Thanks."

"Receipt?"

I shook my head wordlessly, stuffing a dollar into the tip jar. I was already running late. Again. I couldn't miss my connecting flight. I grabbed my drink, glancing at the name written on the side of the cup. E-N-N.

Stupid tears pricked my eyes.

"Not everyone thinks Anne Shirley is a cultural icon," Chris sometimes pointed out with gentle logic.

But Chris wasn't here.

A lump lodged in my throat. Neither was Dad. Not here. Ever again. Gone. Another echo in the emptiness of my heart.

I was going home to my father's funeral. Alone. Without my boyfriend.

It wasn't Chris's fault, I told myself as I sprinted for the gate, my carry-on bag banging behind me.

On Tuesday night, my mother had called, her voice uncharacteristically soft. Subdued. ("It's your father. His heart . . .") Chris had come straight from his shift, holding me as I ugly cried, plying me with mugs of tea and boxes of tissues. He'd rearranged his schedule so we could make the long drive together from Chicago to St. Ignace for the funeral. But then, at the last moment, one of his patients-a little boy with Ewing sarcoma-was readmitted to the hospital.

"I want to be there for you," Chris had said in his best bedside manner, holding both my hands.

The but was unspoken, like so many things between us.

But my work comes first.

But my patients need me more than you do.

Chris was a pediatric oncologist. He treated children with leukemia. Teens with brain tumors. Only a monster would insist that his presence at the funeral of a man he'd barely met was somehow more important.

His hands were smooth and warm. A doctor's hands, calm and capable. I'd squeezed them back. "It's okay," I lied. "I'll be fine."

I admired his dedication so much. But (also unspoken) I needed him, too. I wanted him with me this weekend. Or maybe, now that Dad was gone, I just wanted to feel like I came first with somebody.

The lump was back, a red-hot ache in my throat.


The Mackinac Island ferry loomed above the dock, its steel hull dirty white against the choppy gray water and leaden sky.

There were three kinds of people on Mackinac. The tourists and day-trippers who swarmed the island for six months every year, buying fudge and souvenirs, renting bikes and taking selfies. The wealthy part-timers with their private airplanes and Victorian-style summer homes overlooking the water. And the locals who waited on them, who cleaned their houses and hotel rooms, who carried their bags and watched their kids, who worked for the stables or the park service.

Oh, and the fourth kind. My kind. The ones who went away.

I surrendered my bag to a dockworker and scuttled inside the cabin, taking shelter from a raw wind that cut through my puffer jacket. The temperature was twenty degrees colder than in Chicago, the April sky heavy with the threat of snow.

By habit, I took a seat in one of the back rows with the rest of the locals. A dozen teenagers with athletic bags and water bottles milled around, accompanied by a handful of adults-the track team with their chaperones. I recognized Mrs. Mosley, who gave me detention for setting the snake in science class free, and Principal Olson.

I shrank into my coat. I was a teacher now, the grown-up in charge, the adult in the room. But without Chris beside me, I had nothing to show for my expensive college education and all my big talk of becoming a famous writer. Nothing to prove I had changed from the weird kid who refused to grow up, who stared out the window and talked too much in class, who invented elaborate histories for her dolls and played horses in the woods long after other girls had given up pretending.

The ship shuddered to life.

"Hey there, Annie."

I extended my neck out of my jacket. "Mr. Bartok. Hi!"

George Bartok had been a ferryman since my dad used to take me to the mainland to practice for my driver's license. His son was married to my best friend.

He took off his feed cap, running a hand over his thinning hair. "Terrible thing about Rob."

Emotion rushed in and clogged my throat. I didn't know what to say. Chris would know. He talked to patients' families about death and grief all the time. I searched my jumbled brain for an appropriate response and finally came up with, "Thanks."

The bridge slid away behind us. The engine rattled and throbbed underfoot. The ride to the island took twenty minutes in winter. I pulled out my phone to text Chris-my port in the storm, my refuge.

Landed!

My thumbs hovered over the screen. Smiley face? No. I was on my way to my father's funeral. Kissy face? Maybe. Wish you were here? My mind skittered like a squirrel in traffic before I finally added a heart and hit send.

No reply. Which was totally fine. He was at the hospital, saving lives.

"Look, honey, a lighthouse!" a woman in a fur collar said to her companion.

Beyond it, the humped back of the island rose like a turtle from the great lake.

Home.

The word slid unbidden into my brain. It wasn't my home. Not any longer. The island was my parents' home. My breath hitched. My mother's home.

My father was dead.

I huddled deeper into my seat, jiggling my leg along to the vibration of the boat. My mom made me take baths and do my homework. She fed me when I came in from playing, grubby and sweaty and covered with bug bites. She went to parent-teacher conferences and took me to doctors' appointments. But during the summer months, she was gone-working at her fudge shop-from the time I woke up until she put supper on the table at six or seven o'clock. And when she was home, my constant fidgeting, my ability to lose track of time, and my tendency to blurt out whatever was in my head grated on her like fingernails on a chalkboard. "Less talking, more doing," she would say as she nudged me to clear the table,...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593816498
ISBN 13 
9780593816493
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
369
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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