"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" [.]

[fiefoe]

I guessed the romantic lead wrong. A key character got sent off on a long journey, but unlike other English romance novels, here it is to facilitate the epistolary form.

<The war, the mostly OK parts:>

• Juliet applauded the Ministry of Food for having ordered peas to be planted in the grounds surrounding that memorial - writing that no better scarecrow than Prince Albert existed in all of England.
• Have you noticed there are some people - Americans especially - who seem untouched by the war, or at least, un-mangled by it?
• The boats that had just been to Dunkirk came back across the Channel for the children.
• Well, something shoved (Mr. Churchill)'s soul up a notch or tow, and he decided we could eat.
• Those times, I tried to think of something happy, something I'd liked - but not something I loved, for that made it worse. Just a small thing, like a school picnic or bicycling downhill - that's all I could stand.
• They stripped off the branches, smeared the trunks with creosote, and stuck them upright in holes they had dug in the fields. The trees were called Rommel's Asparagus and were meant to keep Allied gliders from landing.

<Island people:>

• Mr. Brouard reads Obituaries (he has his hopes, but won't say who);
• My fathers before me were tombstone-cutters and carvers - lambs a specialty.
• Isola Pribby, that never had a manner to call her own
• The principle work of the baby's maintenance was undertaken by Amelia Maugery, with other Society members taking her out - like a library book - for several weeks at a time.
• Dawsey took me to a tiny church - every inch of which is a mosaic of broken china and smashed pottery. One priest did this all by himself - he must have made pastoral calls with a sledgehammer.
• It's a real lightning bolt, this Science of Phrenology. I've found out more in the last three days than I knew in my whole life before.
• Dear Susan, You are a heroine! .. when I read your telegram.. I bolted up the stairs and into her room - she was gone, her suitcase was gone, her handbags was gone, and the letters were gone!

__ I could never marry a man whose idea of bliss was to strike out at little balls and little birds.
__ You answer told me everything I needed to know about him - how many men would admit that they loved ducks?

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