MarilynW's Reviews > The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows, John Lee (Narrator), Juliet Mills (Narrator), Paul Boehmer (Narrator), Susan Duerden (Narrator), Rosalyn Landor (Narrator)

Two years ago, I watched the film, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and my memories of the film made me want to experience the audio version of the book. I enjoyed the film but feel like it was much more "fluffy" than the book, leaning more on the romantic side of the story than on the more detailed suffering that the book entails. I probably need to get my head out of WWII and the Holocaust for a while because I'm still reeling by the atrocities inflicted on the island of Guernsey, during the war. Of course, everyone suffered because of the war and in the case of the islanders, their resources were limited by the Germans taking over their island.

As this story goes, told in the form of letters in 1946, thirty two year old Juliet Ashton, the writer of the popular Izzy Bickerstaff series and book, is determined to write something different, under her own name, rather than the pseudonym that she has been using. By chance, she gets a letter from a Dawsey Adams, who had seen her name written in the front of a used book that he bought. Dawsey and Juliet start a regular correspondence. Dawsey lives on the island of Guernsey and he tells her of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, of which he is a member. Soon Juliet is writing to other members of this book club and she knows she has found the subject of her next book.

Eventually Juliet goes to stay in Guernsey and we learn of all the horrors these brave people endured during the war. Only the resourcefulness of the people allowed them to make it through the war with their humanity and dignity intact. So many stories of the brutality of the enemy but sometimes the compassion of the enemy, too. Juliet falls in love with these people and this place. Among those she comes to care for is little Kit, a four year old girl that the townsfolk have adopted as their own, after her mother was taken away for helping a sick slave. At the same time that Juliet realizes she never wants to be away from Kit, she is fending off a marriage proposal from a wealthy American publisher who won't take on for an answer. This is a beautiful story, full of silent heroes and heroines, doing what they could against impossible odds, to help each other and those who needed even more than they needed to get through the war. And it's the story of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, invented in the spur of the moment but now a real book club with the most unusual of readers and reviewers. This story is both sad, funny and endearing, with the funny and endearing winning out in the end. 

Pub July 29, 2008