“Reading keeps you from going ga-ga.”
Some days I wonder if ga-ga is closer than I care to admit. While I’m optimistically inclined to become a book drunkard, if reading helps me also stave off losing my mental faculties…all the better. Thank the Book Gods it’s Thursday and National High-Five Day, so I can shimmie and shake over a Two at Twenty-Seven best-loved throwback. Virtual high fives all around for The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Any lit-lover will be ga-ga (in a good way) over Mary Ann Shaffer’s charming epistolary novel.
What makes Guernsey so good? Juliet Ashton, the central character, is downright funny. She’s looking for the subject of her next book when fate smiles on her with a letter from a perfect stranger: Dawsey Adams. He lives in Guernsey, the second largest of the Channel Islands—an island the Germans occupied during WW II. Juliet is drawn into Dawsey and friend’s wonderful, eccentric, war-torn, but otherwise simple lives. When her story converges with theirs, we’re blessed with a prize of a novel that’s 100% delightful. Here’s one giant ditto for the reviewer who enthused, “Traditional without seeming stale, and romantic without being naïve…It’s tempting to throw around terms like ‘gem’ when reading a book like this. But Guernsey is not precious…This is a book for firesides or long train rides. It’s as charming and timeless as the novels for which its characters profess their love.”