The Book That Made Me Believe in Magic (Even Without Spells)

I was eight years old the first time I met a girl with red braids, too many emotions, and a soul made of sunshine and storm clouds.

Her name was Anne.

Anne of Green Gables wasn’t a fantasy novel. There were no spells, no shadow beasts, no ancient artifacts tucked beneath the floorboards. But it had something even more powerful: imagination that changed reality.

Anne didn’t escape her world. She transformed it.

She renamed trees.

She recited poetry like it was a battle cry.

She believed in kindred spirits and possibilities that others couldn’t see.

Reading her cracked something open in me.

It was the first time I understood that magic doesn’t always wear a cloak or carry a wand.

Sometimes, magic is just how fiercely you love things.

How deeply you feel them.

How you name the world around you and make it yours.

What Anne Taught Me

That book didn’t just make me want to write stories.

It made me want to write everything.

Letters.

Dreams.

Alternate endings for my own life.

I didn’t read it in English the first time.

I read it in Polish, a beautiful hard cover set I still have to this day, with cracked spines and worn edges from how many times I returned to it.

I read the whole series cover to cover more times than I could count.

The names might have sounded a little different, the rhythm of the language shifted, but Anne’s spirit? That was unchanged. She still leapt off the page and made imagination feel like home, no matter the words she used to get there.

Anne showed me that each of us sees the world through a different lens;

and that those differences are not just valid, but beautiful.

Her world shimmered with wonder because she decided it should.

And that idea, that you could choose to see beauty, even in sorrow, it stayed with me.

Meeting Anne helped me survive my own childhood.

When things felt confusing or lonely, her words gave me purpose.

When I didn’t feel safe or understood, her stories whispered that I wasn’t alone.

She helped me make sense of the ache and gave me permission to dream beyond it.

It taught me that:

• Wonder is a choice

• Words have power

• And sometimes, being “too much” is exactly right

Anne gave me permission to see the world differently.

To be loud with my feelings.

To let daydreaming be an act of creation, not distraction.

And Now?

Now, I’m a writer with notebooks full of ideas and characters who talk back.

But somewhere inside me is still that little girl with wide eyes, holding a book a bit too tightly and whispering the words like they were spells.

Sometimes, I wish I could sit down with Lucy Maud Montgomery herself.

Just the two of us, tea in hand, gossiping softly about Avonlea.

I’d ask her what she saw in Gilbert first.

She’d probably laugh softly and say “the same thing you did.”

And we’d talk about words, and dreams, and the quiet ache of wanting to belong.

I still carry Anne with me now.

And I do wonder… if she were to look over my shoulder,

would she see the magic in my stories

the way I saw it in hers?

If you’re reading this now, wandering through this dreamy little website, scrolling through stories stitched with longing and light (once I share them) know that it started with her.

With Anne.

And with a child who saw herself, really saw herself, in the pages of a book for the very first time.

Somewhere in me, she’s still dreaming.

She just has a better pen now. And an abundance of notebooks.

With love, and dreams in her heart,

Eleanor