Quote:
Originally Posted by Uncle Robin
I didn't mind it. I have no experience reading epistolary books, so I don't know good from bad, and maybe I cut it more slack than it deserved. It seemed very disjointed and stilted, but I assumed that was a consequence of the epistolary style.
It's more likely that I gave it a pass for teaching me things I hadn't known about what happened in Guernsey during the war, and because its descriptions of life in Belsen and Dachau made me think of "friends of friends" I knew who'd been in those camps, and much closer friends whose stories were similar to those told in the book of the Guernsey occupation.
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The things I didn’t like about this were legion, so I’ll limit it to a few. An advantage of epistolary books is that it gives the author different voices, but the voices here were all the same (and nothing at all like immediately post-war Britain). Moreover, a limitation is that you really can’t use them as info dumps with any credibility; you have to give up the third-person omniscient author voice.
The heroine was ridiculous, a perfect person universally adored. And the history was exploitative; it was used to give the story heft, but there was no reality to it. Akin to Holocaust stories with the same fatal flaw — oops, the author went there too. Where didn’t she go?
But I acknowledge mine’s a minority opinion!
