Book Review - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

(non fiction)

by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

My book reviews, won’t be like other ones you read, it is my opinion, my description, my review, and that’s that. Yes, there are the main characters, but the one you get to know the most is the one you don’t meet because she has died in a concentration camp, for following her heart during the occupation, and not the rules.  

A friend of mine Dee gave me this book, I thought it was about one thing, and it took me in a different direction quickly, and brought back thoughts I thought were long buried. 

It is about life on Guernsey Island during WW2.

During WW2, so many things had to be kept going, even if there is a war going on.  You can see evidence of that by watching the TV show Foyle’s War on PBS.   

Many people from 1940 to 1945 led a life we who were born after 1945 can only read about in books, and hear in stories from those who lived through it.  When I hear about someone going on a deployment for 6 months, and people are upset,  I know that in WW2 they were gone for 5 years, different times, both tragic that these happened, but I rather someone come home after 6 months, not 5 years, just my opinion.  

Guernsey Island is part of the British Channel Islands, and during the war they were occupied by the Germans.  

The people on there tried as much as possible to keep island life going. Some people tried to get off the island on the last boats to leave with the children who were being evacuated to the mainland.   

Some people took up new identities to improve their fate during the occupation, but for the majority they just wanted to survive the occupation.  If you broke the German rules there were consequences being shipped to St. Malo, France and on to a concentration camp in Germany, for workhouses, starvation, and death.

This book is done in letters starting in 1946,  between the writer Juliet Ashton, and her publisher Sidney Stark, then the divergence starts as increasingly more people decide to enter the fray in writing letters to these two.

They know a something, hoping for a book not just an article to be written about Guernsey Island during WW2, and what happened to the people, the good the bad, and ugly.  Some people thrown into difficult situations rise to the occasion and show strength they never knew they had, and others continue in the negative ways they always had looking out for themselves alone. 

Do the children who were not evacuated understand what is happening, are they scared, why do the rules change from minute to minute, they are not understanding why people are here at times, and then gone.  What are they thinking, did anyone ask them, people are in their lives one day, and could be gone the next with no explanation.

I grew up on Vancouver Island, I admit a larger island than Guernsey, but an island.  We had an air raid siren in our elementary school yard for drills,  the war was long since over.  My thought is where would you go not to be bombed if it happened,  I always thought I’d go to the hills of Duncan, yes an odd place, but my mind thought Victoria would be bombed, and the little places never, the mind of a child.  

This is a wonderful book about island life during WW2 and the occupation, what everyone had to do to survive.  A war some people thought would be over by “christmas” the 1st year, then it went on and on and on.  

I encourage you to read this, and reflect on that time, that we hope will never come again.

Questions to ask yourself

Keep in mind the time, what would you have done?  

Men went to war, gone 5 years, and came home to find their spouse had found someone else?  You come home from being gone to find you have a 3 year old child? Would you talk to the enemy?  Would you tell on your neighbors, pretend to be someone else?  What happened to the cats, and dogs will haunt me, will it haunt you?

Where the authors in Guernsey during the war?? 

Hugs Always

Karen