Staff Reviews & Reader’s Guides
Recent Reviews:
Message form an Unknown Chinese Mother
Rating:
The Magician's Elephant
Rating:
The Tiger's Wife
Rating:
Enduring Love
Rating:
Life by Keith Richards
Rating:
The Book of Lies: A Novel (P.S.) by Mary Horlock
Rating:
A tale of occupation in Guernsey...
With firing a single shot . . . resistance and collaboration - On a personal note, I first became aware of the English Channel Islanders’ extreme and unique hardships during World War II (the Islands were German-held occupied territory for almost the War’s duration, from 1940 to 1945) when reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, a 2009 bestseller. Considered to be of no strategic importance, and therefore not to be defended, the Islands were the only portion of the British Empire invaded and occupied by German forces during the War. By some it has been been referred to as a model occupation; others have said that recalling such distressing times was like reliving them. I was encouraged to learn more. The Book of Lies: A Novel (P.S.) is a first novel by Mary Horlock, and tells the twin stories of family and Guernsey Island life during the occupation, while also, in a 1985 diary form, the parallel tale of 15 year old Catherine Rozier, descendant of one of the families most hugely affected. In attempting to understand, and to come to grips with her family’s dark history (in the 1940s, her then teenaged Uncle Charlie unwittingly exposed his partisan father to execution; after the war, Cat’s own father, Emile, had dedicated his life and career to telling the stories of those who resisted), she runs afoul of and in a very troubled present. At 15, Cat is a bright and willful teen, somewhat estranged from her mother, who longs to be accepted by Guernsey’s more social upperclass, before heading to the English mainland for higher education. To some small extent, Cat’s tale mirrors the author’s, as Mary Horlock grew up on Guernsey and left for university and employment in England (some reviewers have suggested reading the author’s explanatory P.S. first) but the story really belongs to the Islanders who kept “making do” at a terrible time, and under terrible odds. I would recommend this book to adult and older teen readers interested in World War II and in England in general, and in Winston Churchill, the Channel Islands, and in the resilience of the human spirit under duress in particular. It really made me think about how we as humans cope, and what happens when we no longer can.
