Tag Archives: World War II fiction

The Monday Book: THE HOTEL AT THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jamie Ford

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In which Jack guest blogs a book review
I don’t read all that many novels, tending more towards history or memoir as a rule. But Wendy and I headed off recently to our remote hideaway cabin in Tennessee, armed with some leftovers from ‘World Book Night’. These included Hotel, which she thought I might like.
Completely captured within a page or two, I could hardly put it down. More than that, I didn’t want to immediately start another one, in order to savor the ‘afterglow’ of Hotel. That may be the first time I’ve ever consciously done that.
The story concerns a Chinese American boy called Henry and a Japanese American girl named Keiko who live in Seattle around the time when Japanese are being rounded up and sent to ‘detention camps’ further inland for the duration of the war.
This seems like it would be a simple ‘boy meets girl’ tale in an historic setting, but there’s much more to it. For a start they are in their early teens and the relationship is (for most of the book) entirely innocent and really about childhood friendship. Hotel more explores the relationship between parents and children, and between different races and generations and all against a turbulent period in history. There’s even a search for a ‘holy grail’.
The detail and painstaking research may explain why I liked it so much. From the speakeasies of wartime Seattle to the bleak windswept detention camps of the mid-West, the author puts you right there, peering over the shoulders of the characters.
Without wishing to spoil this for anyone else, I wish there could have been at least one more chapter, though.
A very enthusiastic ‘two thumbs up’ from this reviewer!

 

The Monday Book: THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY

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by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

book gurnseyAs a rule I don’t like books that are written in letter form, but this is one of my favorite novels ever. Perhaps because it was written by two authors, they were able to give the various writers of the letters (and diary bits and telegrams, etc.) such varying voices and characters that they form a wonderful comprehensive picture of a community under stress–nice guys, mean people, weirdos, and all.

The book is about the German Occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. It’s not something that has a lot of literature to it, perhaps because “A Model Occupation” (as a non-fiction book about the same subject is titled) can be embarrassing in politics. But the writing of this aunt-niece combo is just lovely. Poignant, gentle, understated elegance meets raucous humor.

The characters are believable, the situations drawn from real events. Terrible things lie next to sweetness and fun–like the letter from Micah Daniels to Juliet Ashton, dated 15 May 1946, in which he recounts “for your book” (Miss Ashton is working on a post-war history) when the Vega Red Cross ship brought the starving islanders food, and the starving German soldiers actually gave it to them–then one soldier stole an islanders’ cat and ate it.

That kind of thing.

The stories are intense, and so very human. In fact, although I suspect the late Ms. Shaffer would roll in her grave to hear this, Potato Peel reminds me of World War Z (the oral history of the Zombie Wars). They have the same straightforward storytelling, the same delivery technique (recordings versus letters, though) and the same darkness-and-light amalgamation. They’re too normal not to be believed, even as they describe one of the most horrific times in history, and one of the most horrific (and unbelievable) apocalyptic scenarios. Maybe that’s why World War Z is more popular – it didn’t happen. Many things like this in Potato Peel did. You can read about the historic research Shaffer did, and how she got interested in the Channel Islands in the first place, with a simple Google search, if you want to.

But I’d recommend reading the book first. It’s a great read, and very thought-provoking.