by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, 2008
Recommended by Christie Leighton, finished 7-10-10 camping up at Chambers Lake, gorging myself on Gorp, pringles, cheese and crackers and wine!
By Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows. Annie finished the book when Mary Ann’s health prohibited her from doing so, August 2008.
What a LOVE STORY!! Guernsey is a Channel Island occupied by the Germans in WWII. Amelia has a pig roast illegally and invites fellow islanders. They get caught on the way home. Elizabeth makes up a story that they have a literary society and asks if they’d like to join. Thus starts the amazing tale of Islanders come together during German occupation. Elizabeth befriends a German officer. They have a child, Kit. German officer, Christian Hellman, is killed over Italy, I think. Elizabeth is taken away from them while they were amidst the occupation, because she was helping a young adolescent Todt slave worker who was almost dead. The islanders didn’t know she was dead until they got a letter from Remy Giraud, who was with her until her execution in camp Ravensbruck. A guard was beating a poor menstruating girl and Eliz. grabbed the rod and started beating the guard. They took her out the next day, had her walk in a row of poplars, she knelt down and they shot her in the back of the head.
None of this you discover until Juliet Ashton, a young English writer, gets a letter from Dawsey because he got her book by Charles Lamb and wanted to know if there were any other books by Charles Lamb. It’s all a series of letters from Dawsey and other Islanders to Juliet and back and between Juliet and her publisher Sidney Stark and her best friend, his sister, Sophie. It keeps you en-rapt until the end – after Juliet moves to the island, jilts Mark Reynolds, falls in love with Dawsey, adopts Kit, and finally professes her love to Dawsey and asks him to marry her and he says yes.
What a wonderful, wonderful book!! Loved every minute of it. Every page, every letter. One of the most interesting characters is Isola Pribby, an islander who makes potions and tonics. Sidney stays with her while visiting Juliet. She is a character!! She finds out Sidney is gay. They develop quite a friendship. He sends her books – Phrenology – study of bumps on head. She reads everyone’s bumps on their heads, including Billy Ree’s, who was on the island to pick up Oscar Wilde’s eight letters written anonymously, signed with his initials only, to Isola. Grandma Pheen and her Duplicitious Bump was extremely large and they foiled her attempt to steal the letters and give them to her trash journalist lover.
Isola is a treasure! As are all the islanders! LOVED this book!!!
Here are the different books the islanders read:
Selected Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb (Dawsey Adams)
Wuthering Heights (Isola Pribby)
The Pickwick Papers (Amelia Maugery)
Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, Shirley, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (These are books Juliet mentions to Isola because they are by the Bronte sisters.)
Selections from Shakespeare, also books by Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth (Eben Ramsey)
Poetry by a Roman named Catullus (Clovis Fossey)
Poetry by Wilfred Owen (Clovis Fossey)
Poetry of William Wordsworth (Clovis Fossey)
The Letters of Seneca (John Booker)
Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle (Will Thisbee)