skygiants

jothra (and possibly one or two other people as well?) enthusiastically recced me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, and I am very glad she did, because otherwise I probably would never have gotten around to reading it. It seems sort of odd to call a book that's so intertwined with many of the horrors of WWII as "adorable," but . . . I am sorry, it really is!

The book is set in 1946 and is written in epistolary format, which is something that is understandably a turnoff to some people but for me is often a key to my heart - I love first-person voices and unreliable narrators and things that come in between the lines of what's said, and novels written in letters are often very good at all of that. I also have a weakness for 1930's and '40s British lady writers (see also: I Capture the Castle, Cold Comfort Farm) and therefore I was thoroughly charmed by the authors' attempts to capture that style.

Juliet, the protagonist, is a writer who made her success writing humor columns during the war and is now looking for a subject for her next book. She finds it when she receives a letter from someone on Guernsey - one of the Channel Islands that was occupied by the Nazis - who has fallen in love with a book that she used to own and wants to inquire if there is any more available by that author. Eventually, Juliet starts to correspond with all the members of the book club that was formed mostly by accident on occupied, starving Guernsey and gets involved in their stories, along with an awesome mixture of book-talk (one character, when introduced to Jane Austen after reading Wuthering Heights, is SUPER EXCITED to discover love stories "not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death and graveyards!" AMEN.) The author really does manage to do a good job of balancing the weight of the backstory, and the different experiences of suffering during the war, with the relatively light social/romantic/literary comedy of the present. Also, it really was fascinating to learn about the occupation of the Channel islands during the war - I honestly had had no idea, which I would feel even worse about if I didn't suspect that the authors knew this and wrote the book in part for that purpose.

Anyway, one other thing about this book is that it has gotten me into a very letter-writing mood! So if you would like, drop me a comment with a mailing address over at this screened post, and within a few weeks you will receive a possibly-incomprehensible handwritten scrawl in your mailbox! I feel I should warn you however that my epistolary style is impressionable like warm wax, so any letters may slip into a terrible wannabe 1940's-British pastiche thing AT ANY MOMENT.