[Book Review] The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Post #175.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The very first novel in the English language was Samuel Richardson's Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, composed as a series of letters written by the heroine to the folks back at home.  The epistolary style of story telling has been used often, and that is the case with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Through letters and a few cables  exchanged by an author and a number of her acquaintances, we are presented with character development  in each person's own words as well as the gradual unfolding of a human drama that could not get more personal.

Juliet Ashton is a journalist and author who penned a series of columns for the newspaper in England during World War II.  When these columns are published as a book, Juliet feels the pressure to follow this first success with another writing project.   As she is agonizing over the familiar, to authors, "do I have a second book in me?" angst, she received a letter from a man on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a Dawsy Adams, who bought a used book by Charles Lamb that had once belonged to her.  Their ensuing correspondence introduces Juliet to the hardships and tragedies of the residents of the island which was occupied by Nazi Germany and then blockaded by Allied navies.  The reader comes to know a range of both sympathetic and unpleasant characters both through their own letters or through stories written about them in others'.  The one person who is not part of the correspondence is Elizabeth, a charmingly heroic figure who was taken away to a concentration camp for defying the Nazi authorities. As she first writes to islanders then writes to her editor and others about her own stay on Guernsey, she realizes that Elizabeth's story is her next book.

The title seems frivolous, but this is by no means a "light" novel.  It is full of hope, despair, loss and mindless cruelty.  It is a love story but more it is about the courage of a group of friends and neighbors who endure often alongside the occupying soldiers the privations and dangers of the occupation.  The mother-daughter team of authors' success with defining individual voices for each of the correspondents and for showing only what each one can know on his or her own is meticulous.

This is the July book for Let's Read Historical Novels, a monthly book discussion group conducted via voice chat at Accessibleworld.org, to which you are cordially invited whether you are visually impaired or not.  I downloaded and read this book from the National Library Seivices' BARD catalogue.