Bibliofreakblog

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

I’m not sure why, but I’m often a bit leery of books written by two people.  People often collaborate on things like screenplays, teleplays, songs, and probably a bunch of other creative endeavors.  But books…  I think it’s because most of the books I know that are written by a team are pulpy crap.  The exception being something where a great person wants a story told and has the foresight to get someone else to write it.  Even then though, it’s often less than good. 

Mary Ann Shaffer wrote the original manuscript for this book.  She sold it before it was done, and then got really sick, so much so that she couldn’t finish it.  Her niece, Annie Barrows, a published kid’s lit writer, stepped in to finish the job.  That’s why there’s two authors.   Possibly also why the ending isn’t very fleshed out.

Overall, it’s a good, fun, read, especially for lovers of Brit lit.  The entire tale is told in letters.  Remember back in the days before the internet and free long-distance calling people communicated via pen and paper.  Weird, I know.

The story sets out just after the end of WWII in London.  Our protagonist, a writer named Juliet, is contacted by a man on Guernsey Island (a helpful map at the beginning shows that this is in the English Channel, near Jersey Island, and while I gather that New Jersey is named after said Island, it never answered my question if Guernsey cows were from Guernsey Island, as I’d thought they were from Wisconsin).  The man, Dawsey Adams, has found Juliet’s name in a book by Charles Lamb, and wants to know if she knows of any book stores in London that carry the author.  I guess in the days of letter writing, before things like Amazon.com, if you lived on an island and wanted books, the logical thing to do is to write to a total stranger and convince you to send you books.

Through letters, Juliet learns of the story of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  During the War, the islands had been taken over by the Nazis.  I had no idea any of England had been under Nazi rule, and if Juliet is any judge of Britons, none of them ever gave it much thought either.  

One night after slaughtering a pig in secret, some villagers are caught coming home after curfew.  To cover up, they say they were at their book club.  Some of the Nazis are semi-interested and so they have to actually form the group to keep up their pretense, albeit now they have no more pork and subsist mostly on potato peel pie, when they can get them.

There are several great things about the book, and one major flaw, though it could be chalked up to personal preference on my part. A main theme is the effect reading and friendship can have on people in times of crisis and uncertainty.  Like I say, lovers of Brit lit rejoice!  This is your book. The characters in the book are really interesting and realistic, though in the beginning I had trouble keeping a lot of them straight.  Team Shaffer-Barrows does a great job in making each letter really reflect the character writing it. To that extent, the characters depart from the cliché in at least one really memorable way.  Some of the Nazis the islanders talk about were nice.  They did things like buy candy for kids, and when starvation was rampant, they flicked potatoes off of their trucks for kids to pick up and take home.  Then again, these aren’t your concentration camp soldiers, and when the book gets there, there’s no Schindler-types.  

So, O.K., my beef with the book.  The romance is lame.  It’s not thought out, and quite sudden.  Nobody knows anybody well enough to be in love.  Which is why I say the ending is not fleshed-out.  It tends to mirror the romances of 19th century novelists, which I hoped we’d left behind in the 19th century.  Apparently people in the 20th century can be just as dumb.

Other than that, I recommend it.  

Buy The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen by Wilfred Owen
Catullus: The Complete Poems by Catallus
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Collected Poems, 1908-1956 by Siegfried Sassoon
Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb
Dialogues and Letters by Seneca
The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontëe
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller
Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Book Thief  by Marcus Zusak
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry 
The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters by Charlotte Mosley
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
84, Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennet
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler
The Lacemakers of Glenmara by Heather Barbieri
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett 

Other works by Annie Barrows:

The Magic Half
Ivy & Bean 
Ivy and Bean and the Ghost that Had to Go 
Ivy & Bean Break the Fossil Record 
Ivy & Bean Take Care of the Babysitter 
Ivy & Bean Bound to Be Bad 
Ivy & Bean: Doomed to Dance 

Other works by Mary Ann Shaffer:

none

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