The Wartime Book Club
In June 1940, Churchill judged the English Channel Islands indefensible. After a chaotic evacuation effort, survivors endured five years of increasingly brutal Nazi occupation. Fishing was forbidden, radios confiscated, mail censored, and the slightest resistance met with imprisonment, torture, or deportation. Daily life was grim. Meetings, even of chess and tiddlywinks clubs, were forbidden. Hundreds died of starvation and disease. Others died or were broken in mainland concentration camps.
Thompson draws from meticulous research to frame a fictional story of long-time friends, postal worker Beatrice Gold and librarian Grace La Mottée, who heroically resist the occupation. As a “postie,” Beatrice clandestinely opens letters from Nazi informants, warning villages in time to hide contraband radios or find new safe houses for those they are protecting. Grace hides banned books (including Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) and starts a wartime book club which briefly gives islanders warmth, community, and escape.
The women’s love for each other, Grace’s great sacrifice for her friend, and the fates of the heroic men who love them, frame this grim tale of English citizens abandoned by their country. As in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, readers will see how access to books can create an indomitable force against oppression.
Despite this inspirational theme, sometimes stilted dialogue and tonal uniformity—no humor or lighter moments and heavy-handed narration—are issues. A bonus for readers is the generous inclusion of primary evidence—photographs, letters, interviews, news stories, and reproductions of anonymous letters informing on neighbors—vivid proof that while many crumple under tyranny, unexpected heroes will rise up, persist, and endure.
