Well, I finished the book, and I guess I liked it a lot more than the previous two reviewers. The criticisms were valid - all too often, the Blythes are mentioned out of the blue in a way that seems unnatural and forced. There's a reason for this - according to the guy that wrote the afterword, some of these stories were previously published in periodicals, and that Montgomery reworked them for the present collection by sticking a few references to the Blythes here and there. This would have been easy to fix, if only she had stayed alive long enough to work with an editor.
Maybe it's just as well I read vison's and Lali's reviews before tackling this book, since I was prepared for the Blythe-fixation, and it didn't bother me so much. And in fact this isn't a problem at all in those stories where the Blythes actually appear as minor characters; it's just when they're referred to in conversation that it comes across as a non-sequitur.
Best example:
It was the one source of difference between him and Clara that she wanted him to wear pyjamas and he was determined that he would never wear anything but nightshirts.
"Dr. Blythe wears pyjamas," Clara would say mournfully.
How on earth would she know that?
In between the stories, we have vignettes of Anne reading some of her & Walter's poems to the family, and their reactions to them. These actually were my favourite parts of the book - they were actually
about Anne and her family, rather than having them foisted unwillingly into an unrelated plot.