[Review] The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Author: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Page: 300 pages

Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Subject: Book Club, Guernsey (Channel Islands) - German Occupation, Epistolary Fiction

First Published: 2008

January 1946: Writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation and of a society as extraordinary as its name.

- Synopsis from book cover

OK, I may have spoken too soon when I said in my Teaser Tuesdays post that I was having so much fun reading this book. The truth is I had only just started reading a couple of pages at that point of writing the post and the idea of an epistolary novel seemed rather refreshing to me.

But you know what they say that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Well, that’s what I felt with this novel as I progressed through it. Reading their correspondences was so much fun at first, but somehow the story gets too predictable and contrived along the way. I was getting bored by each page I turned.

But wait. I did finish the book, though. And I must admit that I did find myself enjoying some parts of it, like the ones where the characters wrote about how the literary club was founded and the story behind its extraordinary name. Any book lovers would have appreciate reading books about books and the joy it brings to our lives.