Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 335
 An unexpected delight June 23, 2008
Sid Nuncius (London England)
358 out of 369 found this review helpful
This is a truly delightful book. I worried before it arrived that an amusing and whimsical title might have persuaded me to request something which would turn out not to be very good, but I was wholly wrong. I enjoyed it immensely; it is witty, erudite without being smug, interesting, laugh-out-loud funny in places and very moving in others.
The novel is set in 1946 and is in the form of letters, mainly to and from the central character, Juliet Ashton, a successful writer who becomes, wholly coincidentally, involved with a group of people on Guernsey who lived through the wartime German Occupation. The characters are thoroughly engaging and Mary Ann Shaffer (although born in the USA) manages to capture the English voice of the time beautifully: the prose is a pleasure to read.
It is very hard to summarise any of the developing stories without giving away more than I'd have wanted to know in advance, so I won't try, but the book has something to say about all kinds of things. Among them are friendship, suffering, forgiveness, goodness and wickedness, the resilience of humanity in desperate circumstances, how reading may influence us and the history of the Channel Islanders during the war. All this makes it sound a bit worthy and turgid, but it's neither - anything but, in fact. I never felt that I was being lectured, the history forms a really interesting and beautifully evoked backdrop to a thoroughly involving story and the observations on other things are either implicit in the doings of characters I really cared about or made directly with wit and flair. And there's a really tense will-they-won't-they love story which Jane Austen would have been proud of and which kept me in nail-biting suspense right up to the last page.
One theme in the book is the impact of reading on hitherto unliterary characters, which carries a risk of being patronising or sentimental. Shaffer has a sure feel, though, and avoids both. She does, naturally, use the device to give her views on some of her favourite authors, but it's very wittily and sometimes touchingly done. For example, one of her characters says of Wilfred Owen, "...he knew what was what and called it by its right name. I was there, too, at Passchendaele, and I knew what he knew but I could never put it into words for myself." As a definition of poetry, I think you could do a lot worse than that. And in the same letter there is a paragraph about Yeats's omission of Great War poetry from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse which made me smile and brought a great lump to my throat at the same time.
Another of Shaffer's characters writes, "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That's a very dangerous thing to write in a novel lest it be turned against you, but there is no chance of that here. This is a very good book indeed and I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I was completely carried along by it and when it ended I was very sorry that there was no more. I urge you to read it. I loved it and I'm sure others will too.
Charming July 10, 2008
kehs (Hertfordshire, England)
89 out of 95 found this review helpful
Told in epistolary form this book is comparable to 84 Charing Cross Road but also has a charm all of its own. Set in 1946, we meet Juliet, a writer who is searching for inspiration to begin a new book. By a string of coincidences she learns about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and becomes intrigued by them. They all begin writing to each other and sharing snippets of their lives. Some of their wartime tales are of heroics; some of love, some are humorous and some are heartbreaking. Through everything that they endured they became united by a shared passion for books. Although, in fact, the book group was originally just a subterfuge to outwit the German soldiers, but became a reality as a love for books was discovered between them all. The surprise at the end is wonderfully warming and such a delight.
Mary Anne Shaffer has told a story of wartime horrors and hardships, yet kept the tone gentle and just bearable to read, without taking away the awfulness of the Nazi occupation in Guernsey. This book had me entranced from the very beginning and will stay with me for some time to come.
Potato Peel Pie is Literary Haute Cuisine August 3, 2008
Mrs. M. G. Powling
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
With about 66 reviews ahead of me, it is unlikely this will be read by many, if any, people. But I can't allow my reading of this book to go unmentioned. It has been a total delight from beginning to end. Therein lies the problem: what to read next? How can anything I have in the To Be Read pile measure up to this? And without stating the obvious, whilst all the chracters are so finely drawn, the island should not go without a mention. I now want to visit the island. Perhaps I shall, only to meet others walking around holding their copies of The Guernsey Literary ... as others in years gone by, visiting far flung places, would have clutched their Baedekers!
Absolutely delightful read July 17, 2008
J Cattermole
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
What a fantastic book! The quirky title was my main reason for picking this little gem, i was hoping the book really would be as fun as the title and it really is!
It's an endearing novel focussing on juliet and the correspondance between herself and a man which happened by sheer coincidence and wanting to meet her new friends made through writing the letters, she visits and once there she loves it and becomes fascinated by the individuals who share their stories of the war and sets out to write a book about one in particular.. but it is so much more than that, it crams in so much energy and warmth, some absolutely amazing characters that jump off the pages and a truely delightful love story. It's one of those books you can't believe you haven't read before, set in time in 1946 you believe the time it's set in and wish you'd read it long before now!
A fantastic read, it's a perfect light read, you'll finish it so quickly like i did, you really enter their little world! Highly recommended.
Wonderful novel July 13, 2008
Simon Thomas (Oxford/Somerset, UK)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society takes the form of letters to and from writer Juliet Ashton, in 1946. She has become popular under her pseudonym Izzy Bickerstaff, writing Izzy Bickerstaff Goes To War - which put me in mind of EM Delafield and The Provincial Lady in Wartime, which is all to the good. She describes herself in one of her letters, saving me the trouble of doing so:
'I am thirty-three years old... In a good mood, I call my hair chestnut with gold glints. In a bad mood, I call it mousy brown. It wasn't a windy day [in a photo]; my hair always looks like that. Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don't ever let anyone tell you different. My eyes are hazel. While I am slender, I am not tall enough to suit me.'
I think I fell in love with Juliet when she revealed that a)she had also written an unpopular biography of my favourite Bronte sister, Anne - and b)that she broke up with her fiance when she found him 'sitting on the low stool in front of my bookcase, surrounded by cardboard boxes. He was sealing the last one with tape and string. There were eight boxes - eight boxes of my books bound up and ready for the basement!' What is more, he'd replaced her books with his sporting trophies. Obviously he had to go.
All this has happened before the novel opens - Juliet is in the throes of trying to find material for a new book. Her correspondance is with her loveable publisher Sidney and his sister Sophie, until out of the blue a letter arrives from a Guernsey farmer, Dawsey Adams, who has found her address inside a secondhand copy of Charles Lamb. Juliet gets the idea to write about Guernsey under Nazi Occupation - and strikes up a correspondance with several Guernsey residents (shy Dawsey; eccentric Isola; fisherman Eben) and decides to visit them to find out more. The letters continue to those back home, including would-be lover Markham Reynolds, and Juliet's life becomes increasingly bound up in Guernsey and its inhabitants.
So what is 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society'? To cover up the eating of an illicit pig (one of the things Nazi Occupants forbade) quick-thinking Elizabeth says that they were at a literary society - to make the story believable, they start one up. And the sustenance is in the form of potato peel pie, being all the food they could find. Elizabeth - who was sent away to a Continental prison during the war, and has not returned - becomes the central figure of these people and the novel, despite her protracted absence.
Like many people, I suspect, I knew little about the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands - Mary Ann Shaffer's novel is so illuminating about the conditions and experiences of those being controlled, but more than that, she creates unique and sympathetic characters. There are some upsetting details, but never gratuitously harrowing - Mary Ann Shaffer obviously knows how much more affecting it is to give us lovable characters and then see how the situation changed them. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is full of such characters - I worried that there were so many letter-writers, but they swiftly became identifiable and dear to me. Above all else, the novel is warm, funny and lovingly written. Bloomsbury plan a large-scale advertising campaign for this novel when it is published in August (sorry! you'll have to wait) and no novel deserves it more - it is sad that Shaffer passed away before she could see her novel published, but she died knowing that it would be, which must have been a great joy.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is something special - Juliet Ashton is a protagonist with just the right levels of humour, fondness and self-deprecation ('Oh, I can see it all now: no one will buy my books, and I'll ply Sidney with tattered, illegible manuscripts, which he'll pretend to publish out of pity. Doddering and muttering, I'll wander the streets carrying my pathetic turnips in a string bag, with newspaper tucked into my shoes'.) The characters are an ensemble cast, you'll love the lot of 'em, and fall in love with Guernsey too.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 335
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