Movie: "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"

Just watched "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" on Netflix. What a sweet film!

Based on a 2008 bestseller by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, it's a love story-cum-mystery taking place in 1946, with flashbacks to 1941, that is set on the English Channel Island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Germans during World War II.

The story is also about a female protagonist who seeks within herself the ability to break with the social conventions of a time when women were supposed to subordinate themselves to men in a male-run world. Even though Juliet Ashton (Lily James) is already an established bestselling author, will she be able to find the inner strength to write not what she and her public and her publisher want her to write, but instead write what her heart tells her to? And will she be able to follow her own heart as she organizes her life-to-come in her postwar Britain?

At the outset of the movie, the audience is shown that German-occupied Guernsey during the war was subjected to the depredations of inhuman, jackbooted Nazis. Now, the war over, Juliet meets the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with whom she has been corresponding by mail. To her surprise, she finds them strangely unwilling to open up to her about their experiences during the occupation. She does learn, however, that the "literary society" was founded on the spur of the moment in 1941 merely as an excuse for getting the Germans to overlook their being out and about after curfew. Yet they are also truly devoted to reading and to discussing literary classics such as Charlies Lamb's Essays of Elia and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Can Juliet break through to the society's tiny handful of longstanding members to find out why they don't want to talk about the occupation? If she does, what might she learn? How might learning it change her life?

I invite Netflix members who might wish to learn the answers, or might ling to view a sweet, cozy, romantic film that packs a message about the values that are truly human, to be sure to watch "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." Enjoy!