The Wonderful Art of Lucy Montgomery

Lucy Montgomery --or L. M. Montgomery-- was the author of the series of children's books that began with Anne of Green Gables.
Green Gables is short---and most of them are just about 200 pages long---but how astonishingly powerful the writing was!  We have the intense personality of the main protagonist shoved right in our faces, while we split our sides laughing!  If I've known one person like Anne Shirley I've known a dozen: total space cadets with runaway imaginations who can barely stop talking for a few seconds!  Many of them are delightful to meet (briefly), but they're impossible as undergraduates.
A few years ago, dozens of them signed up to be Physics majors at our school.  I despaired; I had to teach them trigonometry, and they tended to relate to the subject in strange ways.  Luckily for everyone, many of them switched to other majors, such as Archeology, or Psychology, or even Religion, all of which were better suited to their mystical propensities.
To get back to our heroine, Anne Shirley: what distinguished her was a charm that not every Anne wannabe has.  Most definitely, it is a combination of Anne's charm, her hot temper and her stubbornness that carry us through that first book to its end.