Book Report: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

I finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It is what our book club is reading this month and I whipped through it in a very few days. It is a brief epistolary novel, which means that it is a book of letters. The only book of letters I every thoroughly enjoyed was Dangerous Liasons, though it was rather disturbing. Brahm Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are also books of letters, and I have never finished either of them. Though this great book of letters has convinced me to give them another try.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is such an interesting book that tells the World War II story of the German occupied isle of Guernsey, a small island between the coasts of England and France. The story is a fictional account of an author (based in London) who has an idea to write the story of the inhabitants of the island and their experiences during the war. These experiences were both happy and sad: their children were evacuated to England for safety, some of their own were sent to concentration camps, they dealt with starvation and strange relationships with their German occupiers.

Anyway, in a desperate attempt to hide a smuggled pig they roasted for dinner, a group of Guernsey friends formed a literary society for reading. They all banded together and encouraged each other to read and eventually reached out across the ocean to an author whose name was randomly in a book jacket and the letter writing begins. There are both telegrams and letters, love stories and stories of friendship, deaths and new lives. The letters are well written and the characters are varied. It is a great book and an easy read. I strongly encourage it. I an now onto my next read, The Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Hayward Harriman Churchill.