I had already watched the movie years ago which put me off reading for a while, but flew through this!

It feels weird to describe a novel that mentions concentration camps as cosy, but it was?! Thanks to the epistolary format and the post-war setting, readers are set quite a distance away from any action/horror described, although it still deals with the atrocities sensitively and in keeping with true accounts of the time. 

I think the cosiness and gentleness can be explained by the post-war present tense in which most of the letters are written. The pace of life in Guernsey is much slower, and the novel mostly consists of lovely characters doing or saying lovely things as they try to heal from the Second World War. And there is the lovely found family trope!

It's sweet and comforting, perhaps a little saccharine at times, but that's hard to avoid when writing 1940s middle-class characters who find each other absolutely splendid company indeed, what what. That said, it handles the darker topics well as characters recount the Nazi occupation of Guernsey and the suffering of ordinary people, brave people and everybody in-between.