The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

Set in World War II, The Guernsey Literary etc. etc. (it's an astonishingly long title, truly) recounts, in its own brilliant way, the German occupation of the Channel Islands to the south of Great Britain. I loved everything about this book: the style of the authors' writing (their "voice", if you will), the detail that was used to craft this story out of history (there's that historical fiction again), the way the story is told (as letters written between the characters), and the characters themselves. Oh my, but did I love the characters. I honestly came to love each one of them as if they were real people that I had met. I had half a mind to hop the next boat to Guernsey and settle among them (and that's the other thing this book does: gives one a hankering for island living). With mounting dread I watched the pages left in the book dwindle, almost daring to read no further as I did not want the story to end. Yet I had to know what happened next. The brilliance of this story is that it is told in a series of letters written between the various characters, and I never once felt that I was missing anything because of this. I knew exactly what each person was doing, thinking, feeling via their correspondance.
BOTTOM LINE: Gone to Guernsey to find my friends.