Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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111 of 118 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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32 of 36 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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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Light but deep, 22 Jul 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
In 1996 Madeleine Bunting wrote a book called "The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945" and all hell broke loose. Madeleine Bunting was working for The Guardian at the time (so was I, but not as a journalist) and we had to deal with angry calls and letters to us and other media and Islanders boycotting the newspaper. The Amazon synopsis of The Model Occupation starts "This is an account of the German occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II, involving collaboration, resistance, slave labour and the relentless struggle for survival." It was the mention of collaboration that infuriated them.
My copy of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society doesn't have any explanatory notes or an introduction about how Mary Ann Shaffer came to write it, but I couldn't stop thinking about the whole Bunting affair and the bad feeling following her investigation. There's a moment when our heroine is shouted at by an Islander who doesn't trust outsiders to write about something they didn't experience that made we wonder if this book is partly an attempt through fiction to explore and explain what happened to a wider readership.
I found it an enjoyable read, a bit of a guilty pleasure holiday novel, with extra added historical atmosphere. It falls into the genre of interesting novels with unusually catchy titles that are popular now. Alexander McCall Smith started it with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and they crop up everywhere. My instinct is to avoid such things. They signal that a book is well and amusingly written, not too tricky, not too challenging, slightly emotional here and there but mostly with a happy ending.
That slightly mislead me. Around half way through the book I thought I had it all worked out and I knew exactly what would happen at the end. I was wrong in ever so many ways and pleased that I kept going to find out how the plot really unravels.
My biggest problem was with the Islanders. I could never remember which one was which. Which one was the grandson, which the grandfather? I remember which one was the butler, but the other members of the society seemed to merge. I could go back to find their vital statistics, but sometimes I didn't bother. One man cropped up several times and I've really no clue about his age, looks, job or which books he read. The writer must have had such a clear picture of her characters in her own mind that she imagined that we would be able to remember them all after just one introductory description.
It's a good book for commuting by train. It doesn't tax your brain too much and is interesting enough to keep you awake. (I've often gone past my stop while ploughing through Henry James.) Grab it for your holidays or hire a deckchair in the park and settle down for a relaxing weekend. You might not be reading one of the great works of literature, but on the way you will learn a lot more than you expect about the tiny part of the British Isles that was unfortunate enough to experience Nazi occupation.
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