The Book Lady’s Blog

Available for purchase July 29, 2008

When our rep from Random House visited the store last month, she said that anyone who read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society would want to talk to someone about it. If she also said that we shouldn’t be fooled by the title–it’s not a fluffy book about Southern ladies baking crazy pies and gossiping in their kitchens a la The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood–she would have been right on both counts.

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s wonderful new novel takes place in 1946 in postwar London and is written as a series of letters between Juliet Ashton, a London-based writer, and the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The story begins when Juliet receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a gentleman from Guernsey, a small island in the Channel Islands, who writes to tell her that he has found a book she once owned and would like more information about its author but has not had any luck in Guernsey, as it was cut off from all outside communication during the German Occupation.

As their correspondence develops, Dawsey tells Juliet that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a group that was originally invented “as a ruse to keep the Germans from arresting” a group of friends walking home from a secret dinner party past curfew. Juliet is captivated by Dawsey’s stories about life on Guernsey during the Occupation and his descriptions of the ways in which membership in the Society helped and changed those who attended, and she requests correspondence from any other members who are willing to share their experiences with her. Unexpectedly, Juliet receives letters from almost all of them, including Isola Pribby (my favorite), whose zest for life and colorfulness jump off the page; Amelia Maugery, the nurturer of the group who watches over its members and provides helpful guidance; Eben Ramsey, who is raising his orphaned grandson Eli; and four-year-old Kit McKenna, whose mother Elizabeth was responsible for inventing the society and saving her friends from persecution under the Germans.

As Shaffer and Barrows develop this beautiful epistolary novel, the reader begins to notice, along with Juliet Ashton, that Elizabeth McKenna features prominently in many of the Society members’ stories, and though she cannot contribute letters of her own–she was sent to a prison camp for hiding a slave and has not been heard from since–her presence is felt as fully as if she were there. When she travels to Guernsey, Juliet falls in love with the island and its people and discovers unexpected love and unconditional friendship that make the story even richer and her part in it more real.

I loved this book with a capital L! I couldn’t put it down because I found myself missing the characters and wondering what we were going to learn next. The Society members’ descriptions of each other in their letters are wonderfully vivid, and the characters’ voices are so authentic and well-defined that their letters leave us feeling like that we know them and would recognize them walking down the street. I haven’t enjoyed an epistolary novel this much since The Color Purple, and that’s saying something. The letters help the story progress at a pace that resembles the comfortableness of life on Guernsey and leave the reader ready to run to the mailbox in hopes that there’s something equally delightful waiting for her.

An extra treat in this wonderful book is that the authors are clearly booklovers who understand what it means to value and love and be changed by books, and they allow the characters to give voice to these feelings. Very early in her correspondence with Dawsey, Juliet muses that

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”

What could be more perfect? Haven’t we all had that sense that a certain book was sent to us at a very particular point in time? Amelia Maugery writes of the beginning of the Society and how “those who had rarely read anything other than the Scriptures, seed catalogues, and The Pigman’s Gazette discovered a different sort of reading,” and Eben Ramsey tells her,

“We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.”

Readers who enjoyed Cold Sassy Tree and its charming small-town characters will especially enjoy this selection.  I feel privileged to have encountered this gem of a book, and I can’t wait to see it fly off shelves later this month. To paraphrase Dawsey Adams, I’ll close by saying simply that the writings of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’s members have made me their friend, and it’s a friendship I’ll treasure for a long time to come.