Read The Blue Castle in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 68,100 words.

Twenty-nine years of doing what she was told. One year left to live. Time to break every rule.

Valancy Stirling has never had a life of her own. At twenty-nine she is unmarried, shy and plain, and lives with her controlling mother in the small Canadian town of Deerwood, where her large, judgemental family laughs at her behind her back. Her only escape is her imagination: a beautiful Blue Castle where she is loved and free.

Then a letter from the doctor tells her she has a serious heart condition and perhaps a year to live. Suddenly Valancy stops being afraid. She says exactly what she thinks at a family dinner, walks out of her mother's house, and starts to live, much to the horror of her relatives, who are especially shocked by her interest in the mysterious and much-gossiped-about Barney Snaith.

From the author of Anne of Green Gables, this funny, romantic novel for grown-ups is a cult favourite with readers everywhere.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.