The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Themes

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society follows Juliet, a London author, as she strikes up a correspondence with Dawsey Adams and other residents of the island of Guernsey. It's 1946, almost a year after the end of World War Two, and as England begins the work of putting the country back together, Juliet becomes fascinated by Guernsey residents' stories of the German occupation of the island and how the islanders dealt with…

As the novel follows Juliet and reveals the past compositions of her family, as well as the compositions of other characters' families, it's telling that few of the families are conventionally organized with two married parents and biological children. However, this is seldom seen as a bad thing—in many cases, people are simply happy to be able to care for children after their parents' deaths in the war—and indeed, there are situations where one's biological…

Over the course of the novel, Juliet becomes engaged three times, and at the novel's close, she's finally set to follow through and marry Dawsey Adams days later. By exploring Juliet's previous two engagements to Lieutenant Rob Dartry and Mark Reynolds, particularly in terms of how her relationships with those two men intersect with Juliet's desire to work and the societal norms of the mid-1940s, the novel suggests that Juliet is in a unique…