Sadly, this could have been a great book. The author captures the atmosphere of Guernsey Island -- the peaceful countryside, the changeable weather, the profusion of flowers. Especially the flowers of which there are on-going references throughout the book.The relationship of the main character with her daughters and her mother-in-law are also sensitively drawn, especially how she tries to soften but not hide the horrors of war from the girls.The basic story is how a woman, her husband off to fight in World War ll, can develop a loving relationship with a German soldier who's part of the Nazi occupation of the island. The writer even makes creditable that the couple can sustain the connection over a period of years by avoiding the fact that he's "the enemy." This is possible because he comes to her late at night and leaves in the pre-dawn; there is no true relationship beyond the comfort of sex.This makes it even plausible the way the affair ends: the deep distrust buried under all they don't talk about finally erupts over an escape from the prison work camp on the island.But, considering the book as a whole, I felt cheated by the author who skipped over what I considered vital elements in the story.(WARNING: spoiler info in the following.)First, the narrative jumps from a scene where the woman (whose marriage had been cold and sexless for years) is barely able to converse with "the enemy," although she experiences intense physical desire, to the scene where she's leading him up to her bedroom to start the affair.Yes, I can imagine what happened in between, but HEY, that's why I'm reading the book -- to see how the author handles her character's situation.In the last scene in the book it's 1946. Life on the island is back to normal; her husband survived the war but they are no longer together. The woman goes to meet one of the former German occupiers who tells her what happened to her former lover after he left the island. She receives back the book of poems she'd given him that he always carried. It's bittersweet to see how he'd written his hame below hers in the book, now blood stained from his death.The very last sentence of the book has the woman going home to embrace a little boy with the eye color and smile of her German lover.W H A T ? ? ? Was this to make the ending happy-ish? For me, it cast a spotlight back on the whole story, making glaring how shallow it was.I could accept that the love affair could be kept secret for years with no repercussions to the woman as a collaborator. But to have his child and then, as far as the author tells us, just go merrily back to her peaceful Guernsey life?I can't accept it without knowing how it happened. In some occupied countries women who consorted with the Germans were very badly treated after the war. Were the English on guernsey so forgiving? Unlike the earlier gap in the story I can't fill in what the author leaves out because I don't know, I haven't done research as she says she has about the island's occupation.If the woman didn't become an outcast in society, why not? How not? To answer this the author would have needed to pay more attention to the social life of the islanders, the mores, that underlay civil life. Had she done so, this could have been a memorable book.Conclusion: The author spend too much time evoking the aromas of Guernsey and not enough on the sociological conditions that would have grounded her story in a credible reality.
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