"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (audio)

First "Suite Francaise", then "Remembering Blue", and now this. How can I become so entranced, this early in 2009, by three books in a row? (C.B. James, I think your karma has rubbed off on me!) I'm starting to feel easy. You know, I have a dear friend who years ago read "A Year in Provence" by Peter Mayle. He was so inspired by the charm and whimsy of the French countryside in this novel that he moved to France for a year. I thought of him while reading (actually listening) this book. Now I want to move to Guernsey.

We are in London in the year 1946. The war just over, the world is struggling to find its footing again. Juliet Ashton is a young woman who has just hit it big with a recently published book, and she is looking for a new muse for her next project. Serendipitously, she received a letter from a Mr. Dawsey Adams, a native of Guernsey, one of England's channel islands. Mr. Adams has come to possess a used book written by Charles Lamb, which he is quite taken with, and Juliet's name and address is written on the inside of the front cover. How did it find its way from London to Guernsey? Since there are no bookstores in operation currently in Guernsey, could Juliet give him the name and address of one in London where he could order more books by this author? Juliet and Dawsey begin corresponding, finding much in common, and a wonderful tale unfolds.

Juliet learns of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which was created as an off-the-cuff alibi to prevent a group of curfew-breaking Guernsians from being arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. In order to uphold the charade, they all select books to read and report on at their next "meeting". With the exception of a couple of ladies, this group never would have picked up a book in their lives. This group of loose acquaintenances soon form a tight bond, originating from a newfound love of the classics, and enforced by the day-to-day survival of the Nazi occupation. Juliet begins to correspond with the entire cast of characters, and soon falls in love with their stories, their spirit and their quirks. She leaves London to visit her new friends. It seems she has found her muse.

Uniquely, the story is told as a series of letters between Juliet, her best friend Sophie, Juliet's publisher (and Sophie's brother), Juliet's new boyfriend, the various members of the Guernsey Society, and a few other colorful folks. It provides the points of view from all sides, and although not allowing too much in-depth character study, it makes for a very fun, fast-paced read. I had more than one laugh-out-loud moment listening to the antics of the islanders. And while most of the dialogue is light, it also travels down the dark path of suffering and war-time atrocities that sobered me up pretty quickly.

I must make a special comment about listening to this on audio tape. If you read my recent review of "Testimony" by Anita Shreve, I was blown away by the fact that a whole cast of narrators were used. Well, Guernsey employs the same strategy. It was absolutely delightful listening to the accents and inflections of the narrators, which brought the whole lot of characters to life. I can't imagine reading the book in hard copy!

This is a touching, heartwarming tale that I will recommend to everyone (and when I say the name they will look at me like I have three heads). I dare anyone to not love it.

Wuthering Heights...who's in???

I am a bit embarassed to admit that I have never read this classic. On vacation at Thanksgiving, I happened upon a bookstore that was closing its doors and selling everything on its shelves for quarters on the dollar. I spied an old yellowed paperback of Wuthering Heights and decided it was a sign. So I placed this title on my TBR Reading Challenge list, and lo and behold, there were some other people who hadn't read it either. And a few more that wanted to read it again!

So I thought I would draw a little attention to the fact that I am about to start reading it. Most likely tonight, after the kids are in bed, and am snuggled down for my evening reading time. If anybody else out there wants to join me, please do! (Carrie, Melissa, Michele?) I would welcome your insights!

"Remembering Blue" by Connie May Fowler

Have you ever read a book where you felt afterward that your heart has been wrung out? Or that you have been hypnotized with some mysterious essence that has crept into your soul? These are the emotions I am experiencing after reading this book (my first book in my TBR Challenge). I am smitten. Perhaps for different reasons than the average reader, but my guess is that this novel would work its magic on you too. Many of you may have heard me wax fondly about a little corner of Florida (just tell me to shut up if you have heard this too many times), in the panhandle, that is nearly untouched by the loud, garish development and consumerism that has taken over much of my state. It is a place where there are thousands of species of birds living peacefully, the smell of salt water that permeates everything, roads lined with little seafood shacks and docks, and any local would be happy to stop and pass the time chatting with you about why their corner of the world is special. This is the setting for Remembering Blue.

At its heart, this is a love story. It is also a testament, as we learn from page one, to the life and legacy of the late Nick Blue by his grieving wife.


The story begins with a young woman named Mattie, whose father abandoned her as a child, and whose emotionally unavailable mother recently died. Mattie has few ambitions, and although she is very self-aware and well-read, has been beaten down to the point where she no longer believes she is intelligent or beautiful. Then one day Nick Blue walks into the handy mart where Mattie works, and they immediately form a connection and thus begins their whirlwind love affair. Nick is a salt-of-the-earth guy, a romantic, who sees the beauty and potential in Mattie that the rest of the world has ignored. He has recently left the island where his family lives and works, for reasons I'm not sure I ever fully understood. Did he want to escape the fate of his forefathers...premature deaths on the shrimp boats that provide the Blue family their livelihood...or did he just want to see what else was out there? Nick cannot stay away from the sea for long, however, and he and Mattie move back to the island.

The island was founded by Nick's ancestors, and is not accessible by car. It resides off the coast of Carrabelle, and actually exists in real life, but the name has been changed (probably to keep tourists from storming it). It is here that Mattie begins blossoming. She discovers the meaning of family, of maternal bonds, of tradition. She learns to identify bird species, shell species, how to garden, how to cook, and how to build things with her sweat and her own two hands (freedom by carpentry, she calls it). She becomes her husband's fishmonger, selling his shrimp to seafood wholesalers, making friends on the mainland, and goes to college. She rides out a large hurricane on the island with the Blue family. She is transformed into a butterfly, and you can't help but love her.

This story is a gift. Fowler's writing has a mesmerizing cadence that washes over you. I liken the experience of reading this book to swinging lazily in a hammock on the back porch on a warm summer day, with a gentle breeze blowing. Fowler captures every wonderful detail of this niche of the panhandle, every quirk and nuance, even the insane experience of preparing for and surviving a hurricane. It includes references to the little shops and historic inn in Apalachicola, Highway 98, and the oysters that make this part of the world famous. My little slice of heaven. But, we know from the beginning that Nick is going to die, and as the book progresses, it weighs heavily upon the reader. You will fall in love with Nick just like Mattie did (although I have some doubts as to whether a man such as this truly exists!) and you don't want to see him go. It is heartbreaking, but at the same time, heartwarming. I shall very much look forward to reading two other books by Fowler that I received for Christmas. She is truly a talented writer.

They Have Arrived!

This is a very exciting day for me. I am very pleased to announce that the library delivered my first set of audio books for the Outlander Challenge today! For the first book, Outlander, there are 28 discs, and I am uploading them to iTunes as I am writing this. When I popped the first disc in, I closed my eyes and said a very heartful prayer to the Gracenote Database Gods that they recognized the material on the disk (am I the only one out there that has this annoying problem? ) No, I do not want to manually type the Outlander data into iTunes for over two hundred discs, thanks!

So, soon I will begin my journey. For anyone out there that is interested in joining in the quest to finish all the books in the Outlander series before the new one arrives in September, please register here. I must first finish "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" on audio book (which I might add is the most delightful thing I have read in a very long time) then I am off. Wish me luck!

"Phantom Prey" by John Sandford (audio)

Sandford's Prey series, featuring the hardened, streetwise, and ever-studly Lucas Davenport, are books that I cannot turn my back on. I have a compulsive want and need to read whose butt Lucas is kicking these days. A man's man through and through, Lucas continues to swear, get shot, B.S. with his cop buddies, bend to his wife's every whim, and chase down the latest bad guy (or girl). This may be the 18th installment of the series, but Lucas ain't dead yet. In fact, I think he is getting better with age.

A rich heiress has gone missing, and her mother, who is a couple cards shy of a deck, is begging for help in finding her. Lucas' wife, Weather, asks Lucas to humor the crazy lady (who happens to be her friend) and give it some of his special TLC. But when Lucas starts digging, he finds himself entrenched in the goth underworld, and things just don't add up. A string of murders occur, and it not only becomes apparent that they are tied in with the missing girl, but that they may have been committed by a mysterious "fairy" goth hottie. Then there is the missing $50,000. And the personal trainer that was sleeping with both the mother and the daughter. Then Lucas gets shot (it isn't a Prey novel unless some of Lucas' blood is spilled). Lucas doggedly chases down clues, running into more dead ends than he likes, and soon finds out there may be more than one rotten apple in the bunch.


This is classic Sandford. I can't say it is the best Prey novel ever written, but this is not really a criticism. You just can't beat the installment where he meets Weather and she saves his life with an emergency tracheotomy, or the one where he is obsessing over creating a list of the top rock -n roll songs of all time. It is kinda fun, actually, that Sandford secretly reveals to the reader one of the evil-doers about halfway through the book, and we get to see this person unravel into madness. Sandford is kind enough to save the discovery and arrest of another unlikely culprit for the end. He's also kind enough to leave us wanting for more.

"Suite Francaise" by Irene Nemirovsky

Suite Francaise is one of those rare books where I actually experienced trepidation in reviewing it. I'm not really sure my pedestrian use of the English language can do it justice. A friend of mine, John Cole, very highly recommended it to me, knowing my interest in WWII stories are above the norm. (My husband was raised in Communist Poland, and his parents and grandparents were intimately involved with the Solidarity movement, WWII and WWI.) But this isn't just a book about WWII. It probably was THE first book about WWII. This will probably be the longest post I have written thus far, but please bear with me. It is worth it. Let me give you the back story...

Irene was born in Kiev, Russia to an upper class Jewish family. They fled Russia in 1918 because of the revolution, and ultimately ended up in Paris. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, married Richard Epstein (also a Russian Jew) in 1926, and continued to live in Paris for the duration. Between 1926 and 1939 she published several successful novels. Despite spending their adult lives in France, neither had citizenship. With the threat of the German invasion looming in the distance, both Irene and her husband converted to Catholicism, but the French government still would not grant them citizenship. They shipped their children off the countryside to stay with friends, and themselves stayed in Paris where Irene continued writing. In June of 1941, the Germans took over France. Irene and her husband went into hiding, and Irene began to write "Suite Francaise". She fabricates a fictitious story about a collection of people trying to survive the German occupation, writing it "real time", as it occurred to her. Despite Irene's notoriety as an author, and her conversion to Catholicism, Irene was arrested in 1942 and jailed briefly, all the while still writing. She and her husband were eventually taken to Auschwitz, where Irene died of Typhus and her husband was gassed. The authorities vigorously pursued the children, but were never caught. Years later, Irene's daughter discovered the unfinished manuscript, as well as creative notes, and had them published.

The book is separated in the four sections. The first is "Storm in June", which depicts the mass exodus of Parisians into the countryside to avoid being killed by the approaching German army.

"Then a dark shape would glide across the star-covered sky, everyone would look up and the laughter would stop. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fear, rather a strange sadness - a sadness that had nothing human about it any more, for it lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them."

Nemirovsky focuses in on a handful of families, some hard-working, modest middle-class, and some fussy, superficial upper-class. She intricately writes about the little details of their struggles to survive...their worries about their sons fighting in the war, their attempt to find food and petrol, their frantic grasping for their wordly possessions, their fight for survival on a minute-by-minute basis. The author very keenly captures the terror and confusion of these events - I felt it myself while I was reading it - and we know this is because Irene is experiencing it firsthand.

The second section is called "Dolce". The insanity has settled a bit. The Germans have occupied France, and have settled into the towns and villages, living with the embittered townspeople in their homes. Irene has chosen to focus on one particular small village, where a few of the characters from "A Storm in June" live. There is a food shortage, fatherless families left to fend for themselves, and in the middle of all this, Germans living among them. The disparity between the rich landowners and the farmers is a stark contrast in this section. ..the rich hoard the food and supplies, and the poor are forced to steal. Central to Dolce, however, it the story of Lucile, whose husband is a POW and is forced to live with her rigid mother-in-law, and the young handsome German soldier, Bruno, who lives with them. There is a connection between the two that is likened to an eye of a cyclone. War, hatred and uncertainty outside, but peace and happiness between them. This, more than anything, communicates that war is universally damning. Sacrifices are made by both the victors and the defeated. There are moments so chaste and beautiful between these two, I am amazed Nemirovsky could resurrect such an emotion in light of her circumstances.

The last two sections are Appendix I and Appendix II. Ordinarily I don't give much attention to such things, but in this situation, it is where it all becomes way too poignant and emotional for me. In the first Appendix, we are allowed to read Irene's notes and her creative train of thought with regards to the storyline. It becomes heartbreakingly apparent that this novel would have been one of the great masterpieces of the time, had she been allowed to finish it. We see that she envisioned five sections, the third named "Captivity" and the fourth and fifth unnamed due the uncertainty of the direction the war would take. She muses on the fates of Lucile and other characters, who will fall in love, who will be imprisoned, who will die. She draws inspiration from "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina". In the second Appendix, we know that Irene has been imprisoned, and we read the frantic pleading in the correspondence between her husband and the authorities to release her. We read the letters sent by friends, trying to locate her once she is deported to Poland. It is simply devastating to read.

How many books do you read in a lifetime that truly haunt you? I can only name a few, and Suite Francaise would be one of them. Obviously the circumstances surrounding the author are attributable. That aside, Nemirovsky is a wonderful writer. She has a fresh, humorous, unique style of prose that is easy to read. One particular technique that she uses is when she suddenly steps inside the mind of an unlikely bystander...a pet cat or a small child for example...to chronicle an impression. Her writing also has a texture, a smell, an aura, that makes you feel that you are living the moment yourself, and stays with you for a very long time. Irene Nemirovsky is yet another treasure, tragically taken from us as a result of the Nazi regime.

2009 TBR Challenge

It seems to me that reading challenges are a bit like volunteering at the kids' school...it is a slippery slope, and if you don't find the will to say "no", you will regret it later! I've already pledged my audio book life to the Outlander Challenge, and I've signed up for the Read and Review Challenge, which is a no-brainer (you just review everything you read, which is what I do anyway). However, this challenge piqued my interest. It is the TBR challenge (for rules and sign-up, click here). You simply pick out 12 or more books from your To Be Read stack and read them in 2009. You can read them all in one month, or you can spread them out. This will be my way of forcing myself to stay somewhat focused on my ever-growing pile of prepaid fun. So here is my list:

1. The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb

2. The House of Mondavi - Julia Flynn Siler

3. Remembering Blue - Connie May Fowler. This is an author local to the panhandle, near where we vacation every year. This part of Florida and its essence is in my blood. I received three of her books for Xmas and I will put them all on here!

4. Sugar Cage - Connie May Fowler

5. Before Women Had Wings - Connie May Fowler

6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. Can you believe I have never read this? I'm embarassed...

7. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. Another embarassment.

8. Say You're One of Them - Uwem Akpan. This was Entertainment Weekly's #1 new fiction of 2008.

9. Sashenka - Simon Montefiore

10. Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

11. Resistance - Owen Shears

12. Away - Amy Bloom

So there you are! Keep your eyes open for the reviews of these books to come!