In the Channel Islands

I find myself doing a lot of re-reading these days -- comfort reads for these perilous times. I'd read The Guernsey Literary etc. a few years ago and, turning to it again, found it even better than I'd remembered.  The vivid characters, the beautiful landscape, the intertwined lives and stories were just the thing to take my mind off the Bowling Green Massacre and other alternative facts.

Guernsey and the other Channel Islands would be a lovely place to escape to . . . though with climate change and rising oceans, for how long? 

I've been intrigued by the Channel Islands ever since I read Green Dolphin Street many years ago. It begins and ends on one of the islands with a sizable middle section set in New Zealand -- another island that has always sounded like a nice place to live.

Green Dolphin Street is another of my comfort reads -- the story is perhaps implausible -- a long distance proposal that results in the wrong sister travelling halfway round the world to marry a befuddled suitor -- but the settings and descriptions are the sort of thing I can fairly wallow in.

I believe there was a film years ago but I've never seen it. Have any of you? And if so, how was it? Also, I read that film in beginning this spring on TGLAPPPLS. Something to look forward to!

Recommended Reading

The Art Forger kept me reading into the wee hours -- I HAD to find out what happened.  A wonderful story about art, human nature, Degas, forgery, betrayal, Isabella Stewart Gardiner and her museum in Boston.  Excellent descriptions of how a painting is created as well as how a painter's career is built -- or destroyed.

My agent sent me this book -- Shapiro is a client of hers -- knowing that I'd enjoy it and I did, I did!

Several years after almost everyone I know recommended The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to me, I have finally read it and have to say, everyone was right. It's a charming, quirky story, told through letters and in many different voices.  There are wonderful characters and a fascinating exploration of a previously little known facet of WWII -- the German Occupation of small bit of Britain -- the channel island of Guernsey.