Troubled Waters

Jun14 by Kinsey

Last week I read A Visit From the Good Squad, Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and it was fine. It was well-written and had a very interesting structure (moving back and forth between characters and time periods) and the famous chapter told in PowerPoint slides was quite affecting. But everyone in the book seemed miserable and my main reaction was to wonder if most people in the world are really that unhappy, because I am not and most of the people I know aren’t. Are all the sad, mean people just clustering together in literary novels? So while I would be happy to discuss Goon Squad more in the comments if anyone else has read it, what I want to talk about instead is the next book I read, Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn.

I love Sharon Shinn. When I’m poking around on Amazon or on my library’s catalog and realize that she has a new book coming out, I have been know to let out a little squeal of happiness. Her books generally follow a predictable pattern–they are virtually all fantasy stories in which a strong female lead character has to overcome some of obstacle and falls in love along the way. There are often royal families involved, and magic, the characters generally have to come to understand and embrace the powers they have. But don’t think I’m complaining about the books all having mostly the same plot–they’re great! There’s action and romance and excitement and well-drawn characters, and I know that I am going to be satisfied and will enjoy every minute. There’s also a nice feminist foundation underneath it all. The books aren’t explicitly about women overcoming their oppression by men but you get the clear sense that the author is a feminist, and her female characters are fully-realized people.

It can be tricky to figure out where to start with Shinn’s books, because she’s written a ton. There’s a series of middle-reader books that starts with The Safe-Keeper’s Secret, which are fine but a little young for my tastes, and a number of stand-alone books including a futuristic re-telling of Jane Eyre. But the ones I love, and where I would recommend someone start, are the Samaria series and the Twelve Houses books. These are both multi-book series set in two different universes. The Samaria books are about, well, angels. I don’t want to give too much away, but that series has a slightly more sci-fi twist and includes some entertaining Biblical references, even though it is really not at all religious. The Twelve Houses books are a little more traditional fantasy stories about kings and queens and knights and magicians, but I find them nicely grounded with a focus on the people involved and their emotions. I vastly prefer these kinds of stories when they are told on this smaller scale, especially when compared to Game of Thrones-esque enormous epics that seem more interested in the politics rather than the people.

Now that I’ve got all that explained, Troubled Waters isn’t in either of those series, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a new one. It’s the story of Zoe, a young girl who lives with her father in a tiny village far from the capital of her land. When her father dies (which happens on about page 2, no spoilers), one of the leaders of the country appears to take her back to the capital so she can marry the king, and things all spin off from there. There is royal intrigue and magic and a love story and I found the whole thing just charming. The conceit of of the magic in this book is that it is centered around the elements. Zoe has a particular affinity for water, but it feels like Shinn is setting things up for additional books to follow stories of the other elements. As you can probably tell from how brief my review is, Troubled Waters is not breaking any new ground, but I will happily read as many books about this world as Shinn wants to write.

Vanish in an Instant

Jun14 by Anna

By Margaret Miller

I previously wrote about my love of pulp and noir mysteries, showcasing some of my favorites, and from the list, you can see that it is very much a man’s genre. Which makes sense, I guess; there weren’t as many published women at the time, and the kind of nihilism described in noir novels is kind of the antithesis of traditional femininity.

Margaret Miller is the exception, though, and she is brilliant. Vanish in an Instant, published in 1952, is my favorite, but I’ve read and enjoyed many of her other novels. The thing that makes Vanish in an Instant so exceptional that it is a love story in addition to a murder mystery, which should negate the noir style but only serves to emphasize it, as the two characters cling to their love as a fragile and temporary way to stave off the full bitterness of the world.

This quote captures Miller’s writing, and noir writing in general:

“Outside the wind was fresh, but he had a sensation of suffocating heaviness in his throat and chest, as if the slices of life he had seen in the course of the morning were too sharp and fibrous to be swallowed.”

Yay! I have no idea why this kind of writing gives me such satisfaction, but I do love these noir books and reading them actually brings me a sort of comfort in a way that I cannot analyze at all.

*I’d like to add that my copy is a reissue from the 70s and has much more subtle and attractive cover art.

— Anna

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea; Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China

Jun11 by Anna

By Guy Delisle

Kinsey, these may be the comic books for people who don’t really like comic books. They are really more travel journals that use the illustrated panels to give atmosphere in a way written descriptions can’t quite capture.

The author is an animator who gets sent to various sites to oversee the outsourced animation, so in addition to the interesting locales, he also throws in a few details about the animation business, which is equally interesting to me.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea was published in 2005. A couple of pages in, I realize that this is Eloise for adults! He lives out of a hotel for the entire trip, and has a guide and translator who serve as nannies for him, escorting him anywhere he travels outside of the hotel. The atmosphere he describes in North Korea also sounds very similar to that in Eloise in Moscow, first published in 1959.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, published in 2006, is a disconcerting contrast to Pyongyang, still very foreign, but in an almost diametrically opposite way. After being immersed in the very communist North Korea, every mention of Rolexes and Gold’s Gyms comes as a bit of a shock.

At the beginning of Shenzhen, Delisle says that he has trouble starting the writing/drawing process, and I have to say that it shows. It is much more a collection of vignettes and is a little disconcertingly random, while Pyongyang has a much tighter story narrative. I think that Delisle found his stay in Pyongyang not more enjoyable, exactly, but more interesting, just due to the foreignness of it all. He finds Shenzhen a bit of a grind, and it shows. I would recommend reading both back to back like I did, since I think they are good companion pieces, but if you are only going to read one, go with Pyongyang.

(From my quick amazon.com research, he has also done graphic chronicles of Jerusalem and Burma, both of which I very much look forward to reading.)

The Song of Achilles

Jun6 by Kinsey

I just finished up some work travel, during which I seemed to have terrible reading luck and suffered through one bad book choice after another–overly-dense historical non-fiction, some ridiculous self-help that made me roll my eyes, etc. Luckily, I finally hit a good one and The Song of Achilles entertained me through the last little stretch of waiting out summer thunderstorms in various airports.

Written by Madeleine Miller, it tells the story of Achilles, the great Greek warrior who led Greek troops in the Trojan War and was (spoilers!) ultimately killed by one of the princes of Troy. Now, there are certainly plenty of stories out there about the Trojan War, including The Iliad, if you’re in the mood for some epic poetry. The twist in this one is that the narrator is Patroclus, a young Greek prince who is exiled from his home and raised with Achilles. Patroclus is right there alongside Achilles as he is taught by a centaur and fights the Trojans and moves through all the other relevant bits of Greek mythology. And in Miller’s version of the story they become lovers and life partners.

After I finished the book I reviewed some of the stories of Achilles on-line, and it’s clear that Miller did a tremendous amount of research. The book includes references to some very minor points of mythology and even touches on how stories change over time (that whole Achilles heel thing only came up in later stories, so it doesn’t come into play here). If you’ve read any of Marian Zimmer Bradley’s modern retellings of story of King Arthur or Troy, this book won’t seem all that revolutionary–Miller’s not striking any new ground here by putting a new spin on a classic story. And it looks like that there has long been scholarly debate about the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, so even that aspect of the book is based in history. However, the writing is refreshingly crisp and straightforward and the action moved quickly. Even knowing the basic structure of the story, I was whipping through the book as fast as I could, desperate to find out what would happen next. It was a perfect book to keep my attention while smushed in an airplane seat.

And just this week this book won the 2012 Orange Prize, the British award that “celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world,” so apparently this book is even more well-regarded than I thought. (Plus, the chair of the judges this year for the Orange Prize was Joanna Trollope, who I also love–go read The Rector’s Wife!)

Short Story Glut

Jun4 by Anna

I really like collections of short stories – I think they are a great way to get introduced to new authors and to see a lot of different authors’ perspectives on a shared topic. However, I’ve started to get irritated with these collections recently published that all feature a subset of the same best-selling authors the fantasy genre. It seems like such a blatant money-grab.

I love Patricia Briggs but do not care for Charlaine Harris, so instead of just publishing a book of Briggs’ stories, there is always one of hers in a collection that also includes Harris and other authors I have no interest in. And, I’m sure fans of the other authors feel that way about Briggs. So, this seems like a very calculated ploy on the part of the publisher to try to make us all buy books in which we are only interested in about a quarter or even less of the content (especially disappointing if that quarter turns out to be not all that great, either).

I fell for it and bought two such collections, but wizened up this time and went to the library, and am very glad I did. I originally intended to gather all of Patricia Brigg’s short stories that I hadn’t already read, but an Ilona Andrews story slipped in, too.

1) Naked City, with the tagline “Tales of Urban Fantasy,” has a nice theme of each story being set in a recognizable city that the author gives some attention to describing. Of the five stories I read (out of the 20 in the book), four of them featured plots that were very specifically tied to a feature of the city, which was very interesting. Oddly, though, the fifth, Melissa Marr’s “Guns for the Dead,” was actually my favorite, taking place in an Old West type environment that is kept somewhat generic purposefully for the plot reveal.

Patricia Briggs’ “Fairy Gifts,” was my second favorite, of course, with new characters for her and set in Butte, Montana, which is just so interesting to read about given the complete lack of romanticism around that city. Briggs clearly loves the area, though, and writing about immortal beings such as vampires and fairies allows her to delve into the history of the place.

2) Home Improvement: Undead Edition, with the tagline “All-new Tales of Haunted Home Repair and Surreal Estates,” also features Patricia Briggs and Melissa Marr, and theirs were the only stories I read out of the twelve. This theme didn’t work as well – perhaps it was too specific? Again, Marr’s story edged out Briggs’.

Marr’s “The Strength Inside” features a protagonist of a supernatural kind that I didn’t recognize from any of the normal Western mythologies. I’m not sure whether she was dipping into a more esoteric mythos or whether she invented it herself, but it was interesting either way. And, it is about battling Home Owners’ Associations, which is always entertaining, even if a little clichéd.

Brigg’s “Gray” features a vampire, though not one of her regular characters, buying and renovating an old condo. It has some very sympathetic characters, but isn’t anything original.

3) Angels of Darkness features Ilona Andrews, and was the most worrisome to me when checking it out. The cover looks more like paranormal romance than fantasy, and I knew that Andrews’ books walk that line more than my other favorite authors. And, I was absolutely right to be worried, though it was even worse than I feared.

You know how people criticize the story “The Beauty and the Beast” for basically being a romaticization of Stockholm Syndrome? Imagine Ilona Andrews tried to take that idea, make it super overt, but still try to keep it romantic. It is even more appalling than you are imagining right now.

At 124 pages, her “Alpha: Origins” story is more of a novella than a short story, and is set in a different universe than either her Kate Daniels series or her Edge series. It took me almost a week to finish it because I kept having to put it down because it made me feel kind of dirty, reading about this level of subjugation in a clearly romantic plot.

It reminded me of a call for submissions of fantasy romance books by a publisher that Rebecca told me about. They specified that the story had to feature an older or in some other way societally superior hero and the heroine had to be somehow in his power. It made me gag a little bit.

4) Down These Strange Streets was my favorite collection, leaning toward the noir side of urban fantasy and mystery. There were some really terrific stories, and some not-so-terrific stories, but the great thing about a collection of short stories is that after a couple of uninspired pages, I can just move on to the next story.

It did bring home the point that a good noir mystery is harder to write than people think; the author has to somehow steep the entire story in a casual grimness. A surface gloss of darkness doesn’t cut it, and is quickly recognizable when reading a series of stories by different authors all in a row.

Once again, though, Briggs’ story took second place, this time to a really engrossing story by Laurie R. King, who I had previously known only as a mystery writer. Her fantasy mystery, “Hellbender,” was subtle, realistic, and unfolded with perfect plotting, and I would love to read a full book of the same characters and universe.

Briggs’ story, “In Red, with Pearls,” was my favorite of hers that I read in this glut, and featured one of her regular but peripheral werewolf characters, Warren, and his boyfriend Kyle. The short story structure didn’t give her as much time to explore characters and relationships as I would have liked, but was still a very entertaining mystery.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kinsey’s very acute analysis of her preference in memoirs made me revisit my short story collection preferences, and I think it is very similar. The more collections I read, the more I respect the editors. It seems like they need to tread a very fine line, where collections should have a common theme that tie all the stories together, but not such a narrow theme that the stories seem repetitive. “Urban fantasy” is too generic; “house renovations” is much too narrow.

—Anna

Fifty Shades of Grey

May30 by Christine

by E L James

[Editor: Here’s the second perspective on Fifty Shades of Grey]

First, think Danielle Steele with an edge.

I haven’t read Danielle Steele in over 20 years, but what I remember of the genre is the redundancy of a heavily sexual plot with over-the-top beautiful characters. Fortunately for Fifty Shades of Grey, leading male character Christian Grey steps up the level of intrigue through his divergent pursuit of leading female character Anastasia Steele.

Anastasia, or Ana, is on the eve of her college graduation. Her best friend Kate is the editor for the university’s newspaper and has a high-brow interview with the 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey, who will deliver their commencement speech. But Kate has the flu and begs Ana to stand in for her. Ana arrives at the interview knowing nothing about Christian. He of course is hot, and she of course doesn’t know how beautiful she is. She’s also unassuming and lacking confidence, and trips and falls when she enters his office. In Danielle Steele style, the electricity between them is palpable. Ana is inexperienced with men and freaked out by it. Christian, on the other hand, is a man who knows what he wants and gets what he wants. Ana has no idea what she’s in for. He lives the art of seduction, and she’s hooked.

And so is the reader. As Ana enters into his sexual world of “dominant-submissive” relationships, Christian is not so much pleasing the pants off of her (like every hour)—he’s pleasing the most devoted readers. When he takes her into his sexual play room (what Ana calls his “red room of pain”), it’s out of the ordinary, and intriguing.

Next, think a new kind of liberation for women.

Having read and discussed Fifty Shades of Grey as part of my book club, I got to thinking about it from a different angle. These days, post-women’s liberation, the lines are blurred as to who’s in charge in a relationship. Women often have the upper hand—regardless of the fact there are women’s lib issues that need balancing. But in exchange for this relatively new sense of power and freedom of choice, have women completely put their submissiveness aside? And have they inadvertently transferred too much of that submissiveness to men?

Christian is a rare species of a man. In his own deviant way, he’s both an old school gentleman and an intensely controlling character. Combined, this can actually be a turn on for readers. Why? He brings a new light to submissiveness. At the end of the day, would it be so bad to have a man open your car door, decide what you’ll have for dinner, order a nice bottle of wine, pay the bill, tell you what to wear (or what not to wear), instruct you how to wait for him in his play room as he enters with no shirt, top button of his jeans undone…

It’s not Ana’s struggle to be a modern independent woman that gets readers fired up. Nor is it her exhausting insecurity and repetitive self-monologues. It’s the intrigue into her relationship with Christian through which he teaches her to give up the need to be in control, and in the process, makes it look sensual and gratifying.

The Fifty Shades of Grey plot is purely dependent upon its erotic twist, but the Danielle Steele feel is its saving grace. It’s not all spanking, whips, and bondage (or even close)—that which is supposed to define Christian as “the dominant.” It’s actually pretty fluffy, and a love story. Yet the author knows her hook. While the play room, the backdrop for the dominant-submissive rules and regulations, does not come into play often, it leaves readers wondering how far Christian will go and why he is the way he is. Why else dive into the next two books of the trilogy?

—Christine, Guest Contributor

Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

May28 by Rebecca

This is the first of two reviews of this book. The next one will likely be somewhat more positive. So keep an eye out for another forthcoming review.

Fifty Shades of Grey
E. L. James
2012

I enjoy fanfiction, both the fact that it exists as a genre¹ as well as the genre itself. Thus, when I heard that someone had written an AU² Twilight fanfiction and then changed the names in order to publish it professionally, I decided to read it. I hadn’t enjoyed Twilight, but mostly I found it uninteresting and poorly crafted. With a different author and a different setting, this had potential.

Especially since the articles I had read about it, were mostly shocked by the fact that apparently women can like sex. Yes, even mothers! The fact that this is apparently shocking makes me mourn for the women’s movement. Given that this was the primary complaint about the book, I thought the book must be pretty good.

Alas, I was doomed to rather severe disappointment.

To a certain extent, E. L. James did fix one of the major problems I had with Twilight. The characters are well presented. The narrative descriptions match their actions. Thus, Ana is both described as shy and acts shy. Christian is both described as arrogant and acts arrogant.

Another thing the author does really well is build anticipation. What’s going to happen next?, how are these two characters going to get together?, etc. It kept me reading for about half the book.

Then I hit the first sex scene, and wow, the badness.

From there on out, as the book attempts to get more serious, it becomes something of a travesty that I had trouble slogging my way through.

It’s not clear to me that this author (or the editor for that matter) knows what sex involves or any real concept of physicality or how bodies work much less anything at all about the BDSM³ lifestyle. Given the whole plot of the book is based on the sexual awakening of a young woman and the moderate depravity of her love interest, the lack of understanding on the author’s part is a major problem.

The problem with this book is not that it was based off of another author’s work and not that it contains a lot of sex; the problem is that it’s poorly researched, poorly written, and, to an even greater extent than Twilight, it attempts to romanticize a highly dysfunctional relationship.

¹ U.S. Copyright law involves a fundamental division between idea and expression. Ideas are not considered under copyright, ever; only the expression of those ideas is protected. In the past, this was taken to literally mean the exact words. Even translations were considered to be a matter of the ideas rather than the expression. More recent legal interpretations of copyright have expanded what exactly is considered an expression to include not only translations but also events, places, and characters. However, no case of fanfiction has ever made it through the court system, and thus whether or not the genre infringes on copyright remains uncertain.

² AU in this context means “Alternate Universe.” In fanfiction, this means taking well-loved characters, relationships, and plot devices and transposing them into completely different settings and situations. In this case the Twilight characters were used in a modern setting.

³ BDSM stands for Bondage & discipline, Dominance & submission, Sadism and Masochism. (It is not to be confused with DBMS, which stands for DataBase Management Systems, with which I am somewhat more familiar.)

The rest of this review is going to involve spoilers of the R-rated variety, so I’m putting a break here. Proceed at your own risk. Continue reading →

Blood, Bones & Butter

May22 by Kinsey

I like memoirs and I read a lot of them. Some of them work better than others. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is not going to go to the very top of my list, but it a solid book and an enjoyable read. Plus, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did helped me figure out exactly why I like some memoirs better than others, which could certainly help my future book selections.

Hamilton is the very respected chef at Prune, a very respected restaurant in New York’s East Village. (I’ve never been there, but the menu sure looks good.) There are about a million and one chef’s memoirs out there, but this one at least offers a change from the standard culinary school story, since Hamilton took a much more circuitous route to restaurant ownership. She roughly divides her story into three parts that echo the title. The Blood section deals with her childhood and her family, who sound fun but wildly dysfunctional. Personally, I don’t like reading about people’s childhoods and found the first section of this book a real slog–I honestly wasn’t sure I was even going to keep reading. But Hamilton leaves homes as a teenager and moves to New York City, and things pick up from there. In Bones, she describes how she wandered through work in large-scale catering houses and through an MFA program before opening her restaurant and I found all of that fascinating. (Her stories about the catering world also explain a lot of things about the meals I ate a conference recently.) Finally, Butter deals with her marriage, kids and, in-laws. Sound pretty standard? Well, she’s a lesbian who marries an Italian man so he can get his green card (sort of?), has kids, and then falls in love with his mother and the annual trip to Italy to visit her husband’s family. So, not so standard. There were a lot of things in Butter that felt very glossed over to me–she talks in depth about the affair she had with the Italian before they married, but hardly mentions even in passing how they choose to have multiple children–but Italy sure does sound nice. I might have married the guy for those in-laws myself.

So what insight about memoirs did this book lead me to? That memoirs work better when they are structured around something very specific. My favorite two memoirs of recent years were Eat, Pray, Love and Julie & Julia. I think those work well because they both use a particular activity or time period as a framework for the story, such as Julie Powell spending a year cooking her way through one of Julia Child’s cookbooks. This prevents the memoir from falling into a patten in which the author just basically describes everything that has happened from the time they were born up until the present. In Julie & Julia, no matter what tangents she goes off on or what she chooses to discuss, I know that the book is going to come back to what she’s cooking and that it’s going to end when the year is up. In Blood, Bones & Butter, Hamilton does use the three title ingredients to create a structure, but it’s limited–I actually didn’t figure out how the sections were divided until after I had finished the book. And the real weakness of the everything-up-until-now method of writing a memoir is that things often just sort of stop when the author reaches the current day. I definitely felt that way with this book and would really like to hear the rest of Hamilton’s story. I am aware that when someone is writing the story of their life, that story may not have a classic narrative arc. That’s why I think the very explicit structure of something like Eat, Pray, Love works so well. As a reader, I want for there to be a conclusion of some sort, and putting a frame of time or concept around the story helps provide that. Blood, Bones & Butter is an interesting and well-written book–maybe it is to its credit that my main issue with it is that I wanted to hear more of the story.

Finder Library: Volume 1

May19 by Anna

By Carla Speed McNeil

Finder is my favorite graphic novel. Period.

As much as I defend graphic novels and truly believe that they can be equal to any novel, most of them aren’t. Finder, however, blows most novels out of the water. When I first stumbled across one of the graphic novels, Sin-Eater, at a library years ago, I was entranced; her stories and characters stayed with me in all the years since then, and last week, I was overjoyed to see that Dark Horse has published an anthology of her Finder novels, including Sin-Eater.

It is hard to even describe the scope of Finder. McNeil builds an entire world with a blend of futuristic technology and mysticism, and populates it with dozens of different tribes of people, many of whom borrow attributes from various real-world cultures, such as ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Native American. Our protagonist is from the tribe most like Native American, and he is a “finder” by trade, which is a bit of a cross between tracker and private detective. Through his adventures (and each book-length graphic novel follows just one) we explore the entire world, traveling to the different lands and meeting peoples of different tribes.

Every single panel of the 600+ page anthology adds details to the cultures and histories. Many of them include references to our real-world culture (though it is clearly not set in our world; or possibly our world many millenia in the future). Ones I caught included The Last Unicorn, Neil Gaiman, and Masquerade, and they were just enough for me to recognize that for each reference I caught, there were no doubt dozens that I missed.

For some of the ones I missed, McNeil has endnotes in the back (of both this anthology and the original graphic novels) in which she explains some of the references and elaborates on many of the characters and places. I had already been impressed with the expanse of the book, but the endnotes were where I really began to feel awe toward the author. She has back stories for characters that only feature in a single page and names for characters that only have a single panel!

The book is insidious, really—you pick it up thinking to read an adventure story about a lone-wolf character, but the density of it all gets in your brain and has you picking at it for days afterward, trying to unravel it all.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

May12 by Kinsey

Why did I think that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a feisty-woman story like The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood? Why, based on nothing but the title, did I decide that this was one of those books that would be beloved by art teachers and your mom’s friends and the women on the View? I’ve done this before, enough times that I could probably start tagging posts How My Vague and Uninformed Impressions of Books I Haven’t Read Are Completely Wrong. I have no idea where I got my Ya-Ya impression, but this is not one of those books. I avoided it for years but when I finally read it, almost by accident while trapped on a plane, I loved it.

Okay, here’s what this book is actually about: during World War II the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, which are these tiny little islands that lie between England and France. They’re part of the British Commonwealth, but not technically part of the United Kingdom–I think of them as sort of like the British Puerto Rico. Anyway, during the war the British government didn’t have the resources/chose not to defend them, so the Germans moved in early in the war and assumed that this would be their first step towards occupying England. That obviously didn’t happen, but the people who lived on the islands spent nearly five years under German rule and were not allowed to have any communication with the outside world during that time. This story takes place after the war and occupation have ended when a young London writer, looking for something new and meaningful to do, starts corresponding with a group of islanders. She encourages her new friends to tell their stories about life under the occupation, but she also gets caught up in their present-day activities and her own efforts to move on from the war.

As a WWII history nerd, I appreciated reading about a bit of the war that I didn’t know much about, and I am fascinated by the post-war period in Britain, so I liked that part as well. In the U.S. we tend to think of the late 1940s and into the 1950s as boom years, but those were very austere times in Britain. Sugar was rationed until 1953! Meat until 1954! It was a whole different world and I think this book nicely captures the mixed feeling people had at the time–thrilled that the war was over, but tired and a little overwhelmed by the rebuilding. But this isn’t really a typical WW II book–overall, it ends up being more charming than traumatic. First, since it takes place after the war has ended, you hear about what people experienced but you’re not living it with them–there’s a sense of remove. And second, the book is told in epistolary format, meaning that the whole thing is made up of letters and telegrams sent back and forth between the various characters, so it’s got this sort of delightfully chatty style. More than anything else it reminds me of 84, Charing Cross Road, another British post-WWII epistolary story. (If you’ve never read 84, Charing Cross Road, forgot all this other stuff and go read it immediately. It’s wonderful, and if nothing else it can serve as an example of how astoundingly much our world has changed in 60 years.) Look, Nazis are Nazis and there are definitely upsetting parts in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I felt hopeful when I finished this book and that is something than can be hard to find.