A couple of readers have mentioned the new Netflix movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Netflix movie just out. I
read the book almost ten years ago when it was all the book club rage and wrote about it.
Here is my take from back then if you are interested, from my Jan's
Journal blog. And no, there is no copy of this book in my Blue Hill Books little lending library.
I am staying with my daughter who is expecting triplets and saw a fun-looking book on her dresser, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. So I read it. It seems like everyone has read it and loves it. But I didn't. It was clever and all but the more I read the less I liked it. Which sort of annoys me because of the time invested. Here are some of the problems:
1. Oversentimental. I don't know why I hate this. Maybe it's just bad writing. The word maudlin comes to mind.
2. Exploitive. It uses the tragedies of wartime as the setting for a cutsey book. My dad was a veteran of WWII and a POW. He saw what it was like. And he didn't think Hogan's Heros (the TV comedy about a Nazi prison camp, 1965-71) was at all funny. Alongside the humor, the authors use fictional (?)war atrocities to manipulate the reader. I don't know. This bugged me, too. And yet I like historical fiction. This just didn't sound genuine. It sounded opportunistic.
3. Unrealistic. Try contrived. Stretched. Predictable. The little hints the authors dropped along the way added up until . . . how convenient! The perfectly wonderful childhood friend/editor guy is homosexual and THAT'S why the perfect couple will never marry. Duh. I'm pretty sick of "the most wonderful guy turning out to be gay so the most wonderful girl can marry the unassuming underdog" scenario. It's just too neat. And phony. The whole phony gay thing is used and overused because it gives greedy authors a whole new direction to twist the plot. It's getting mighty old. And that's just ONE of several too-convenient little twists in this book. Sort of like how kids in junior high always write fantastical stories that -- Surprise! -- end up being a dream all along. Which brings me to--
4. Anachronistic. As in historically incorrect. This story is happening in 1946. I'm pretty sure that in 1946 having a child out of wedlock and homosexuality were pretty much looked down upon by practically everybody as social ills. Even the people acting out. Hello! I really hate it when people assign the social trends of today to characters and events that happened in a completely different time, as in assigning an acceptance of sexual immorality to a time when mainstream society upheld traditional values. It makes me think such authors are misled, uneducated, have an agenda, or all of the above.
5. Demonizes religion. This is another trendy tactic that's getting really old. This book would have you think that one of the very few bad, crazy, hateful characters in the story was, you guessed it, a CHRISTIAN. Never mind the NAZIS who happened to be occupying the island and oppressing its inhabitants. The authors made the only openly religious character a horrible person whom everyone couldn't stand and made fun of. That's not only anachronisitic but pathetically politically correct. I personally have never known a single hateful Christian (hateful because of their religion). Have you? They simply are not as commonplace as our modern culture would have us think.
6. Shallow, unbelievable characters. Yes. All the good guys and girls are way better people than everybody else, so good as to be perfect except of course for their adorable, endearing, trite little eccentricities which are supposed to make us love them all the more. Gag. Perfect characters end up being predictable, flat, and boring. We don't remember them or learn anything from them.
7. Self-Serving. This is a book written by writers about a fictional writer/heroine, obviously glorifying her for all that she is: smarter, better, more observant, and just plain more wonderful than any other living being. Ugh. Oh, what a noble existence and calling! it says between the well-penned, name-dropping, literary snob-tainted lines. Ordinary people -- strangers--, at the mere thought of a writer being interested in them, write her effusive personal letters for her writing project and cannot contain their joy when she condescends to visit their island, whereupon they roll out the elegantly quirky and homey red carpet. And then they all fall even more in love with each other and the islanders give up the unbelievably darling, quirky (of course) orphaned child for her to legally adopt. Yeah. Sure.
"Please, no," I found myself muttering out loud here and there.
What I liked about the book? It was written entirely in letters. I like those. They are clever and fun. I just finished rereading Daddy Long-Legs which was delightful. My daughter Cami and I play book games sometimes. Once we tried to name all the books we know written in letters. Too bad this book was made of letters that felt forced and predictable.
Here's something funny. One of those adorably quirky characters actually mentions that good books ruin you for bad ones. Well, yeah. Too bad the authors stuck that in there, never supposing from their perceieved ivory tower that some reader might think THEIR book was one of those bad ones. Oops.
Okay, I'm done. Sorry if I was harsh. But people who write books open themselves up to criticism. And I do wish readers would think more critically.
