All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
I have to start by saying that this book has received
tremendous reviews from various news outlets.
It has over 6500 five star reviews on Amazon and was a National Book
Award finalist. Good job, book. I’m going to first provide the Amazon
summary, not because I don’t want to write my own, but because it doesn’t get
much more condensed than this.
“From the highly
acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly
ambitious instant New York
Times bestseller about a
blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as
both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.”
Thanks Amazon, back to me now. Based on this summary I was expecting more
interaction between our two protagonists.
I wasn’t expecting a love story.
In fact, I really didn’t want one.
But, I was expecting the two to have more to do with each other than
they ultimately did. I kept waiting for
that to happen and it took a very, very long time. The story is told through various timelines,
jumping forward and backward, but always following the parallel paths of
Marie-Laure and Werner. It is beautifully
written and imagined, but, in the end, I was disappointed by the lack of a
truly overlapping story. That being
said, I still rate it highly. For fans
of WWII fiction, this is a must read.
Reviewed by Ashley
