'Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' tells story through letters

 No comments  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

 Dear Editor,

Thanks for “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. What a great book. It’s written entirely as letters — an epistolary novel, if you please.

The title’s on the cute side but the work is solid. We see things through the eyes of Juliet Ashton, a young, witty writer, enjoying her first success in 1946 London. She’s pondering her next book when she receives a letter from a stranger in Guernsey. He writes that he’s read the “Selected Essays of Elia” in a copy inscribed with Miss Ashton’s name and address. He asks if she could help him find more works by Charles Lamb because he has come to love them.

[+]Enlarge

Here’s where the letter writing conceit really pays off. When Juliet answers and asks straightforward questions, the letters that come back reveal, bit by bit, in rich and varied detail, the story of the recent Nazi occupation of this British channel island, closer to France than it is to England. And so, we learn the origins of the title Society (they never intended to pursue literature!), the geography and history of the island through WWII and the personality of each member of the group. In due time, Juliet travels to Guernsey to see things for herself.

You’re wondering — chick lit? Not really. Think Nazi atrocities and the minds of men at war; think valor and death and unrequited love of stoic men; think birth, death, betrayal and love against the odds.

Still my favorite passages are not those that advance the plot but those in which author Shaffer, an editor and librarian, in her first novel, gives voice to the ordinary, scantly educated people of Guernsey who, beset by the worst of circumstances, discover the transcendent power of literature.

A farmer writes, “… I came to see that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth were thinking of men like me when they wrote their words. But most of all, I believe that William Shakespeare was …. It seems to me the less he said, the more beauty he made.” Now that’s a dissertation.

And a potion-making healer scribes out a motto for book reviewers everywhere when she writes, “Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”

This extraordinary book will be the last by Mary Ann Shaffer. She died this February. In fact, her niece Annie Barrows is listed as co-author because she completed the book for publication. It’s a bittersweet circumstance befitting the nature of the novel.

I really liked it. Review to follow.

Yours,

Kandra

Kandra Hahn has degrees in English and business and has worked as a reporter, a public servant, in publishing and nearly always in some way as a writer.