RC Part 49 - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

Categories: uncategorized

Tags: Reading Challenge, books, reading, evacuation, Guernsey

Date: 28 July 2008 13:12:27

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer is a fabulous book, made even better by the fact that I read it whilst in Guernsey. It was recommended to me by Jack the Lass and I purposely went into the bookshop in Guernsey to try and find it and I found that they are launching it on the island on the 9th of August.

The book is set in 1946, a year after the liberationof Guernsey from the Nazi occupying forces. A writer, Juliet Ashton, is looking for a subject for her next book when out of the blue she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a farmer who lives on Guernsey who has recently acquired a second-hand book which used to belong to her. They start corresponding and Dawsey tells her that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and so begins Juliet's quest to find out more about this society. She starts to receive letters from other members of the society and as a result she decides to go to Guernsey to find out more about it.

This book hit the mark for me on so many levels. Of course being born and bred in Guernsey it features my beloved island and it describes the nuances of this tight-knit community so beautifully. Also, the book follows Juliet's love affair, not only with the island, but also with the characters she meets and the generosity she encounters amongst the islanders. The book has a strong undercurrent about the Occupation and talks about the experiences of the locals living the 5 years of Nazi rule.

The one thing I did not expect when I started reading the book was the strong sympathy I felt for some of the German soldiers, in particular one called Christian who falls in love with a Guernsey woman. It is very easy to think that all the Germans who were sent to the island were hard-hearted, callous individuals. In reality many of them left their own families and children and were missing them as much as the islanders were missing their children who had been evacuated. One of the characters says in one one of the letters...

”To tell the truth, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. You couldn't help but feel sorry for some of them - stuck here knowing their families at home were being bombed to pieces. Didn't matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me anyway. Why there'd be soldiers on guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army's mess hall - children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile - on purpose. They did the same with lumps of coal - my, those were precious when we didn't have enough fuel left.”
I love this book for so many reasons but not least because it helps me to connect with my past, and not many books do that for me these days.