The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Book Discussion Club Meetup with ESL students

On 13 December 2018, B2.1 and C1 ESL students gathered together at EOI Luarca, Room 32, first floor, for our first book discussion club meetup, after having been reading 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' novel for nearly three months.

Reading is much more than opening a book and thumbing page after page. Reading means imagining the time and location where a novel is set, understanding the characters and their reactions as well as putting yourself in their shoes; analysing the authors' styles and backgrounds, reviewing, commenting and feeling the whole story, so as to later celebrate your learning with your class peers in a social event. For example, a school meetup. 

This is obviously time consuming and involves prior work before joining such a book discussion club meetup, and the B2.1 and C1 ESL students who attended last Thursday's meetup were up to the challenge, and even thought of empowering everybody's brains with some Christmas sweets! 

Thanks for that, too!

In order to better understand the timeline of  'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society', some had even listed the letters the characters in the novel exchanged!

Others had sketched the main ideas or drafted a full review of the novel, but they were all quite adamant about their feelings towards and against both the book and the film.

A soft book in which the change of authors is quite noticeable as regards the writing style, with a bit of a disappointing development of the female main characters; a predictable love story sort of ending, and only one hard passage for the readers to reflect on: the evacuation of children from Guernsey to an unknown future due to the German occupation of The Channel Islands in the Second World War.

As regards recommending the book to others, 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' has been liked by a few of the meetup attendants, who have also found it easy to read, but a lot more attendants have claimed they do not regard it as their cup of tea and were not ready to say they would suggest other readers to dive into it along 2019.

Several meetup comers have already watched the book-based film, released back on 26 October 2018, and highlight the wide gap between the movie and the novel it is based on. Actually some are even struck by the fact that both works have nothing in common, so that if it had not been for their having had to read the book, they could have perfectly watched the film without even learning it was based on a novel.

To cut a long story short, in general, readers would rather read for the pleasure of reading and choose their own books instead of having to compulsorily read what the EOI Luarca tells them to read!

Undoubtedly, a tip to note down for the upcoming future!