The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
With a name like that it’s impossible not to be interested. It begs to be read; and once you open it, the begging gets more desperate.
Read me! It cries. I’m a book of letters! I feature a writer and a loveable farmer and an only-slightly-crazy islander/potion brewer! I’ll make you laugh and cry! You’ll have a peculiar urge to visit the English island of Guernsey after reading me!
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Genre: Historical, Epistolary*, and if it were a genre, Home.
Author: Mary Ann Shaffer
Content: Often people talk of the horror that came with living on occupied Guernsey during World War Two. Mentions of concentration camps. A woman has a child before marriage. A Ravensbrück survivor spends a good deal of time in the letters.
Memory: "And then Dawsey, dear Dawsey, swore. He took the Lord's name in vain. "My God, yes," he cried, and clattered down that stepladder, only his heels hit the rungs, which is how he sprained his ankle."
Rating: 5 stars.
Overall
I love this book. I love Isola Pribby with everything and I adore her parrot. Dawsey Adams has taken up residence in my heart and Juliet Ashton will forever be one of my literary role-models. I want Amelia as a grandmother, or maybe just a good friend.
I want to be a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
After reading this, I get the same feeling I remember having after finishing the Anne of Green Gables books. I wanted to live in Avonlea more than anything, and I wanted red hair, and I wanted a Gilbert Blythe. Finishing this felt like walking through the doors and into the brisk air conditioning of the Bell Center Lobby this past summer.
It felt like Home.
Characters
Characters
This isn’t a plot driven book at all, although there was a tiny plot that I was rooting for and seriously flopped back on my bed and laughed when everything tied up with it. No spoilers here though. ;)
Back to what I was saying. This is not a plot book; it’s a character one. You don’t pick up Potato Peelers to read about the German Occupation of Guernsey or an author’s struggle to find a good plot for her books in 1946, you do it to hear Juliet become pen pals with the members of the Society. To listen to Isola Pribby’s hilarious stories, to hear Dawsey talk about Charles Lamb.
You read for the characters, and they are amazing. They’re so real, it almost feels like this is a collection of letters from 1946, not a story. I picked this up and was taken to Guernsey even when Juliet wasn’t there yet. I was, for a few hours, a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and it was amazing.
There’s one character I haven’t talked about yet, and that I don’t want to say much about because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone. But her name is Elizabeth, and she is one of my favorite characters in any book I’ve read.
Buy it?
Yes.
Oh, yes. If I didn’t already have a wonderfully beat up copy from Mariesa, I would order a hardcover from Amazon right now.
And, finally, this book is so quotable. I think I spy some new canvases on my walls in the future. ;)
*I only just looked up the genre epistolary, because I saw it on Goodreads and thought it looked good. ;) It's a book of letters, in case you couldn't tell from its being put with Potato Peelers.
