Review by Shwetha H S
Imprint: Dial Press
ISBN: 1984801813
Genre: Historical, Drama, Fiction, Humour
The late author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer, passed away due to cancer a few months before the book was released. Her niece and co-author, Annie Barrows, stepped into her shoes to complete the book and make it see the light of the day. I am glad it happened. If not, I would have missed one witty book by female authors.
Juliet Ashton is a writer with few books to her name. She is not the typical girl of the WW2 era. Not coy, not timid. She is a person of her own mind and that mind of hers makes her pursue things that lead to her betterment. Wow. I love her. I see myself in her. I would totally do whatever she did in the situations she faced in the book. Getting back on track, she is an orphan but has close friends to call family, Sophie and Sidney. Under certain circumstances, she befriends the members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on the island of Guernsey under the nationality of England. When she gets to know the problems they faced during German occupation of the island and more intriguing facts about a few people, she decides to go to the island herself leaving behind a suitor, Mark, and her book publicity tour. There she finally meets her pen pals with whom she had developed a bonding over the letters. Amelia, Isola, Eben, Dawsey, Elizabeth, her daughter Kit, and Will are the prominent characters from the island. They all are present in person except Elizabeth who is in all the narrations of others. What happens between all these characters is the rest of the story. Each character in the story is different, but I kind of didn’t gel well with Isola. She was too much for me. If she were real, I would not have tolerated her bubbly nature.
I have personally never liked the epistolary format of books. Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Swiss Family Robinson, they all bored me to death and I came alive by finishing them with audiobooks. But The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is different. I fell in love with the way letters are written. The narration is witty. So humorous that I want to wake Mary from her grave and kiss her and surrender to Annie for the prowess they exhibit in this book. Chuck the movie. Read the book. The movie does zero justice to the story and doesn’t even follow the same storyline completely.
We Read That Too 