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Showing posts from July, 2009

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Much has been said about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrons and all of it has been unequivocably positive for it's just skirting "precious" charm and reconstruction of a place and a time at a nostalgic distance from our own. The book IS charming, the characters not just likable but admirable people of low pretension and large old-fashioned virtues. Now why this book makes me a bit uncomfortable. Everyone is basically good, even the German occupiers of bucolic Guernsey. Christian, the long-gone father of the orphaned little girl in the book, is a noble German, worthy of respect as a person. And the girl's mother, the mythic Mary McKenna, is a brave individualist. On the spot, she makes up the story about the neighbors meeting for the book society, when they were really having a festive dinner of contraband pig. Later for helping a Polish slave laborer, she ends up in a concentration camp, where she is killed because

LIT, A Memoir by Mary Karr

I had never read Mary Karr before, though I'd heard The Liars' Club was good, because I'm not fond of memoirs or confessional writing generally unless the person had an amazing life.. When I found out LIT was about how Karr became a drunk and fought her way to recovery, I figured on giving the galley away. The whole 12 step thing has always seemed a tragic joke to me but then I heard Karr talk at Book Expo about the excruciating business of soul baring and why she had to do it--to set the record straight for her son. And she was funny talking about her pretensions as a poet newly married to another writer, an Ivy League blue-blood and about to start her own family. She congratulated herself on having escaped her mother's galloping insanity and triumphed over her soul destroying, hard scrabble childhood in Texas. Ahead of her was a life of love and achievement. But then, life brought her to her knees in more ways than one--she could have died and she had to learn to pray