Rainbow Valley by Lucy Maud Montgomery; Anne of Green Gables, Book 7; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Pam Ward

The seventh novel in the Anne of Green Gables saga, Rainbow Valley focuses less upon Anne and more upon her neighbor, Presbyterian minister John Meredith, and the interaction between his and Anne's children.

Anne Shirley is grown up, has married her beloved Gilbert, and is now the mother of six mischievous children. These boys and girls discover a special place all their own, but they never dream of what will happen when the strangest family moves into an old nearby mansion.

The Meredith clan is two boys and two girls, with a minister father but no mother-and a runaway girl named Mary Vance. Soon the Meredith kids join Anne's children in their private hideout to carry out their plans to save Mary from the orphanage, to help the lonely minister find happiness, and to keep a pet rooster from the soup pot. There's always an adventure brewing in the sun-dappled world of Rainbow Valley.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was one of the most famous Canadian writers of the twentieth century. She is best known for her books for young adults, particularly Anne of Green Gables and its six sequels chronicling the adventures of Anne Shirley, a feisty but sentimental orphan who is adopted by elderly foster parents. In her lifetime, Lucy published 20 novels and some 500 short stories and poems. Her writing, rich in imagination and full of lessons in optimism, brought her international fame and remains popular today.

Lucy was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1874. Soon after her mother died (when Lucy was just two), her father remarried and moved away. He left Lucy to be raised by her maternal grandparents in Cavendish. The isolation of this small town combined with the strict discipline of her grandparents led to an unhappy childhood.

Lucy was an avid reader and writer at an early age. She published her first poem in a local paper at the age of fifteen. She studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, then returned to Cavendish to take care of her grandmother, worked at a local post office, and became a schoolteacher

While caring for her grandmother, she wrote Anne of Green Gables. Several publishers rejected the book before it was finally accepted, and it became a bestseller. Eventually, it was made into a musical, a television movie, and a television series. Lucy later married a minister and moved to Ontario, where she died in 1942.

Pam Ward has had many incarnations, including private detective, classical musician, television talk-show host, and actress, having performed in dinner theater, summer stock, and Off-Broadway, as well as in commercials, radio, and film. But she found her true calling reading books for the blind and physically handicapped for the Library of Congress Talking Books program, for which she received the prestigious Alexander Scourby Award from the American Foundation for the Blind. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, her many audiobooks include Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich, Breaking Free by Lauraine Snelling, The Second Journey by Joan Anderson, and Lion in the White House by Aida D. Donald. She now records from her studio amidst the beauty of the Southern Oregon mountains.