The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
Submitted by Book Nut
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
ages: adult
First sentence: “Dear Sidney, Susan Scott is a wonder.”
Copy won in a contest sponsored by A High and Hidden Place
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Sometimes, when I read a book, one word keeps popping in my mind. For this book, the one word I constantly thought was charming. Utterly, unabashedly, and unreservedly charming.
The book reminded me in many ways of 84 Charing Cross Road, and it wasn’t just that it was an epistolary novel. Shaffer and Barrows got a feel for the time (post-war), the place (England), and the people. That, and it’s a book about readers and community and belonging, all of which I totally love. It’s got a bit of everything, too: romance, literary illusions, soaring descriptions, history. It’s a war book, an epistolary novel, a romance, a work of historical fiction.
It’s nearly perfect.
Perhaps the only thing holding it back was the hype. I’m always suspicious of NY Times best-sellers, and while I think this one proved my suspicions wrong, I do think that I wanted more out of it. I wanted it to be more soaring, to be more than it actually was. Perhaps that’s the nature of the book, though: to get so involved in it that you want more at the end. Whatever the reason, I did enjoy the journey: I just wanted something more out of it.
But what I did get was thoroughly captivating.
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