Book: The Guernsey Literary...

[Erudite]

Title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Authors: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Genre: Historical fiction
Pages: 288

I think I'm late in getting to this book, and you've probably all read it already. I know every woman in my entire family has and I'm pretty sure the book group around here did...but I just finished it today.

It is an unusual book to be sure, but very endearing. The style is that of letters. The entire story is told by letter to or from writer Juliet Ashton. She is a resident of London in 1946 who is contacted, by letter of course, by a man living on Guernsey, one of the channel islands (in the Channel between England and France). His contacting her develops into more and more letters between them and eventually Juliet is writing to or receiving letters from about a dozen people on the island as she has decided to write a book about the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII from the perspective of those who lived through it.

The story is mostly heartwarming and occasionally heart-wrenching. It turns into a love story, but mostly it's a story about people who care about each other in a real and human way that warms your heart and makes you want to be a better person.

Further...for the writers out there...the writing is gorgeous! It made me want to take up pen and paper and start WRITING letters to someone, anyone, so that I could re-focus on life a bit and see things through the eyes of a writer like these two women are writers. It is an amazing book in thinking that writing can be like that. My favorite line was about the town's nosy, self-righteous, peeking out her windows find the dirt on people Adelaide. She is described as "too good for daily wear". It just made me chuckle!

This is a fantastic book that I think men would quite like, but it really is a woman's story. It does have explicit scenes from concentration camps in Nazi Germany as well as about German POWs on Guernsey, which is the "heart-wrenching" part I mentioned above and so is probably not for younger readers. Other than that, I can highly recommend the book to anyone!