The first one I read was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie which was very cleverly written mystery, with a delightfully morbid sense of humor, if you like that sort of thing. In fact, I was a little afraid at first because the opening sentence describes the tweleve year old protagonist's wall paper by comparing it to dried blood. And the girl herself, Flavia, of all things, is rather scary. Her passion is poisons, and her craft is chemistry. Therefore there are lots of chemical mentionings throughout the novel, (references to herbs, referring to minerals in latin, and that sort of thing). Her family is also a little offsetting. There's no happy family here, but one complex tangle of solitude and grudges. It made me feel rather sad, though I suppose it made for a more interesting read. All in all the book was perfect for summer, with everything from murder to bicycle rides. I'll be interested to see if the promised sequels to this book can live up to it.
The second book has a title so long that I'm going to have to look it up, I just call it the Potato Peel Pie book, but that won't do here. It's full name is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which will make sense to the reader about ten or fifteen letters in. Yes, that's right, this is a book of letters. Ever sense I read Daddy Long Legs (by Jane Webster) and Letters From Camp (by Kate Kilse), I have been in love with letter novels*. Is there a term for them? There must be somewhere. Anyway, this book take places right after the end of WWII, but the reader gets the chance to hear many different accounts of what happened during WWII. While most of the recollections are from people who were on the island of Guernsey when it was occupied by the Germans, some of them are from survivors of labor camps. Some of the stories will leave you feeling ever so small. This made an edifying read, if I may use that word in this context. By the last third of the book, though, most of the "history" aspect disappears. If you've managed to get that far you won't mind the lighter turn it takes, you will be so interested in what happens to the characters you won't be able to put it down anyway.
But there were somethings that I didn't like about it. The main character struck me as a person I wouldn't get along with, I can't really explain why, unless it's that I'm narrowed minded and stodgy, while she is opened minded and uninhibited. More concretely, there was no end notes that said "yes these things really happened" or "while these exact things didn't happen, very similar events did occur. " I really like that in historical fiction, it makes me feel better about using novels as a basis for facts. In the end though, all my words mean very little. The only way to know if a book is really any good is to go out and read it for yourself.
*Also, one of my favorite books as a teen was Ella Enchanted, which had a section of letters between the main characters. Kate Kilse, though, will always be the measure I use to evaluate all such books.
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