Word: dawsey
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...single woman in possession of a promising literary career, is coy about whether she is in want of a husband, but several candidates present themselves regardless, including her publisher Sidney and a rich, handsome American named Markham Reynolds. The countermelody begins when Juliet receives a letter from one Dawsey Adams. He lives on a farm on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, he explains, and he has acquired a used book with Juliet's name and address written in it. He wonders whether she can help him obtain more books like...
Oddly enough, it doesn't. The book Dawsey has found is Charles Lamb's Selected Essays of Elia. The Essays of Elia also crops up in 84, Charing Cross Road, but Guernsey takes it in a different direction: here we learn that Lamb's sister Mary was a madwoman who stabbed their mother to death. This kind of morbid detail comes up a lot in Guernsey, and it cuts the treacle nicely. The authors have a bracing interest in suffering and death that knocks the cuteness right out of the book. When Dawsey remarks on how cheerful Juliet...
...Through Dawsey and his friends, we learn the story of the Germans' World War II occupation of the island, a bleak affair of starvation, humiliation and slave labor. We get to know a cast of scuffed, scarred Guernseyans who formed a book club as an alibi to keep their doings secret from curious Nazis. Where Bridget Jones' mascaraed eye might have turned away from such things (v. unpleasant!), Juliet's focuses in on the story of a fiercely independent, bona fide--quirky Guernseyan named Elizabeth McKenna, now missing, who had an affair, and eventually a child, with a German officer...
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