Word: juliet
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...Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Dial; 277 pages) by Mary Ann Shaffer and (and!) Annie Barrows, you know you're in for some quirk. It's just not immediately clear which kind. The book's heroine is a single woman in her early 30s. Her name is Juliet Ashton, and she is a journalist. The year is 1946. Juliet lives in London, a city from which the pall of World War II has not yet lifted. The rubble is still being cleared, the dead identified, the delicacies rationed...
This is an epistolary novel: we get to know Juliet and her friends through their letters and telegrams to one another. Juliet, a 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...
...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 is, she bristles: "A sunny nature? A light heart? I have never been so insulted. Light-hearted is a short step from witless in my book." And in this...
...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...
Granted, the romance plot ticks along as well, as Juliet industriously and entertainingly whittles down her roster of suitors. But the authors show a firm hand with their characters. They even kill off a few, and the casualties aren't cutesy stage deaths with finely calculated thematic meanings. Death, in its truest, most frightening incarnation, means nothing. The characters in Guernsey may meet cute, but they don't die cute. They come by their quirkiness the hard...