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225 of 239 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unexpected delight, 23 Jun 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This is a truly delightful book. I worried before it arrived that an amusing and whimsical title might have persuaded me to request something which would turn out not to be very good, but I was wholly wrong. I enjoyed it immensely; it is witty, erudite without being smug, interesting, laugh-out-loud funny in places and very moving in others.
The novel is set in 1946 and is in the form of letters, mainly to and from the central character, Juliet Ashton, a successful writer who becomes, wholly coincidentally, involved with a group of people on Guernsey who lived through the wartime German Occupation. The characters are thoroughly engaging and Mary Ann Shaffer (although born in the USA) manages to capture the English voice of the time beautifully: the prose is a pleasure to read.
It is very hard to summarise any of the developing stories without giving away more than I'd have wanted to know in advance, so I won't try, but the book has something to say about all kinds of things. Among them are friendship, suffering, forgiveness, goodness and wickedness, the resilience of humanity in desperate circumstances, how reading may influence us and the history of the Channel Islanders during the war. All this makes it sound a bit worthy and turgid, but it's neither - anything but, in fact. I never felt that I was being lectured, the history forms a really interesting and beautifully evoked backdrop to a thoroughly involving story and the observations on other things are either implicit in the doings of characters I really cared about or made directly with wit and flair. And there's a really tense will-they-won't-they love story which Jane Austen would have been proud of and which kept me in nail-biting suspense right up to the last page.
One theme in the book is the impact of reading on hitherto unliterary characters, which carries a risk of being patronising or sentimental. Shaffer has a sure feel, though, and avoids both. She does, naturally, use the device to give her views on some of her favourite authors, but it's very wittily and sometimes touchingly done. For example, one of her characters says of Wilfred Owen, "...he knew what was what and called it by its right name. I was there, too, at Passchendaele, and I knew what he knew but I could never put it into words for myself." As a definition of poetry, I think you could do a lot worse than that. And in the same letter there is a paragraph about Yeats's omission of Great War poetry from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse which made me smile and brought a great lump to my throat at the same time.
Another of Shaffer's characters writes, "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That's a very dangerous thing to write in a novel lest it be turned against you, but there is no chance of that here. This is a very good book indeed and I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I was completely carried along by it and when it ended I was very sorry that there was no more. I urge you to read it. I loved it and I'm sure others will too.
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59 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Charming, 10 Jul 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Told in epistolary form this book is comparable to 84 Charing Cross Road but also has a charm all of its own. Set in 1946, we meet Juliet, a writer who is searching for inspiration to begin a new book. By a string of coincidences she learns about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and becomes intrigued by them. They all begin writing to each other and sharing snippets of their lives. Some of their wartime tales are of heroics; some of love, some are humorous and some are heartbreaking. Through everything that they endured they became united by a shared passion for books. Although, in fact, the book group was originally just a subterfuge to outwit the German soldiers, but became a reality as a love for books was discovered between them all. The surprise at the end is wonderfully warming and such a delight.
Mary Anne Shaffer has told a story of wartime horrors and hardships, yet kept the tone gentle and just bearable to read, without taking away the awfulness of the Nazi occupation in Guernsey. This book had me entranced from the very beginning and will stay with me for some time to come.
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85 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Guernseyman's perspective, 5 Oct 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Coming from Guernsey, and having family who lived through the Occupation, I thought that this book might give me a different perspective on what life was like after the Occupation had ended, a period that is often overlooked even here on the island. Styled as a series of letters between a London-based author, her friends and a group of Guernsey book aficionados, I was afraid that I might find it hard to engage with any of the characters emotionally as in my experience first-person letters can't convey the same sense of emotion that can be gained by well-worded, third-person prose. Fortunately, the letters are written sometimes seriously, sometimes comically, and this helped me to form some attachment to the characters, perhaps not to the extent I would have liked but enough to keep me interested, though not entirely engrossed, in the story.
As a novel, this book is definitely one for people who like their literature simple and straightforward, to a point that it could easily be a year 12 reading project. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, with so many authors these days throwing big words around as if to marvel their audience at how clever and talented they must be to be using so many big words with such abandon. `The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' has no such airs, being easy on both the head and the eyes with its easy manner and gentle vocabulary, and makes for both a light and enjoyable read.
However I have two fairly strong criticisms of the book, the first being that the author seems to have got all of her information from only one or two sources and doesn't appear to have actually been to the island or spoken to anyone who lived through the Occupation. The names of Guernsey characters (and, to an extent, locations) aren't quite `right'; on more than one occasion I cringed when reading an improperly spelled surname or an address I know has never existed. Of course these are things the majority of readers would never pick up on, and certainly wouldn't affect their enjoyment of the book, but if you want an accurate and thoroughly researched Occupation novel, my advice would be to look elsewhere.
My other criticism is that the majority of the letters are either from the author to her England-based friends or vice versa, with only the minority being written by members of the eponymous Society. As such, on only a few occasions do these members get to recount events from the Occupation and to talk about what life was like here under German rule; a large portion of the book is taken up with fairly superfluous chats between the author and her English chums about literature, love and any other old tat that comes to mind. If you were to remove from the book all references to Guernsey, the Occupation and the war generally, I sincerely doubt that you'd lose more than 25% of it at the most.
It could be argued that this book was never intended as anything other than an easy read for a wet Saturday afternoon and if that's true then it truly is mission accomplished. But having had Occupation stories rammed down my throat from an early age, I found the whole thing to be little more than a fairly cheap cash-in on a relatively under-served part of British history. There's no denying that some of the stories that are recounted do make you feel for the characters and their plight, but even with these this book merely skims the surface and gives very little idea of how bad things truly got.
If you're after nothing more than a book before bedtime, then you can pick this one safe in the knowledge that it'll be money well spent. However, if it's a book on the Occupation that you're after then there are much better ones (both novels and reference works) out there and I would recommend seeking these out instead. They might not be as easy on the palate, but I guarantee they'll give you a much better idea of what life was really like in Guernsey, both during and after the war. And to be quite honest, I find it more than a little disappointing that a whole swathe of readers will assume that the book accurately portrays Guernsey folk and life during the Occupation when all it does it take a bunch of people who could be from any town in the U.K. and adds a few references to Guernsey locations.
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