Subject: Historical Fiction
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Germans occupied the Isle of Guernsey early in WW2. They confiscated anything and everything, including food. A curfew was in place and the islanders found they could skate around it a bit by saying they were at a literary meeting. The Potato Peel Pie was a dig at the Germans for what little food they left for the islanders. While perhaps not verbatim, much of the book is based on facts. The Germans could not destroy their spirit. They did prevail.
This book is available at the Grover Beach Community Library
All The Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
A teenage girl in France lost her eyesight at a young age and her father built a model town to teach her how to get around the city. The book also tells how an average teenage boy was drawn into Hitler’s Army. The boy and girl meet, and the result is this book. It is a book of survival and explains what it meant to be an occupied country.
This book is available at the Grover Beach Community Library
A Fall Of Marigolds by Susan Meisner
The author is a prolific writer of historical novels. This book is about two women living in New York City 100 years apart but both experience tragedy. Most of the book takes place in 1911 at the time of the garment worker fire, which killed 146. The 2011 takes place after 9-11, 2001, with a 10 year memorial. The women are connected by a scrap of fabric. How does this connect them? You gotta read it.
The Horseman by Glendon Swarthout
In the new west a hard working woman homesteads by herself. This is story of a struggle to survive.
Metropolis by Philip Kerr
This is the fourteenth book of a series about Bernie Guenther who was a cop in Berlin in WW2. However, this is the beginning of Bernie’s story. The author was found to have stage -4 bladder cancer and he wrote this to explain how Bernie started.
Wallis In Love by Andrew Morton
Who has not heard of King Edward VII who gave up the throne of England to marry Wallis, the woman he loved? This is another book about Wallis’ side of the story. There have been several books about them and this was written as a sort of a response to the fact that Wallis hired Cleveland Amory, a celebrated American author, who she felt would put a lighter touch to their story. He quit after six months and that is why I say this is a ‘novel’. Wallis would tell many versions of her childhood, but when it came to the affair she would tell her story and tell Mr. Amory to verify it with the others involved. Unfortunately, they did not verify anything. So, Mr. Amory quit, and years later Mr. Morton took pen in hand to attempt to write the story. Most of the participants were no longer living, so he had to verify with families, children and what little documentation available. The book can be summed up in four words: “What Were They Thinking?”
Next Meeting: October 11,2022 at the Grover Beach Community Library, 240 No. 9th St, Grover Beach at 10:30 a.m.
Subject: A Book that made you laugh. How warped is your sense of humor?