Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Scribner, 2014
Pages: 544
Rating: Recommend
Synopsis: From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy who paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. 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, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance.
Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doeer illuminates the ways, against all odd, people try to be good to one another.
Review: I put off reading this for a long time for several reasons. The first was that the market is flooded with World War II novels, and how does one compete with the amazing stories I've already read; The Nightingale, for example. World War II novels also tend to be emotionally draining, and I have to prepare myself for it.
Secondly, it's long. I don't have an aversion to long novels, but it's a rare author that can keep a story moving and interesting for over 500 pages.
Years after it's release date, All the Light We Cannot See is still on book lists and being recommended on various sites so of course I had to give it a go.
I wasn't sucked in within the first 100 pages, but the chapters, which alternate between Werner and Marie-Laure stories are only 2-3 pages long each so it feels like you're reading at a much faster pace than you are. It also makes it easier to stop and take a break when it gets to be too much.
When I closed the book after reading the last page, all I could do was sit there and think "wow." Someone described it as a slow burn, and there is no better description. It won't have universal appeal, but it's a reader's novel and I loved it.
The only thing I still can't grasp is what the author gained by the scrambled timeline. For example, it opens in 1944, returns to 1934, then advances to 1940 so on and so forth. It works, but why structure it that way in the first place?
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