All the Light We Cannot See
2014
- blind
- fiction / general
- fiction
- youth
- world war, 1939-1945
- fiction / literary
- fiction / historical
- history
- reading level-grade 9
- reading level-grade 11
The story
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel 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 within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work
What it’s like
Hushed, luminous and tactile, with prose that lingers on the small sensory world: the ticking of a cane on cobblestones, the hum of a crude radio, sea wind through a narrow house, the cool hush of a museum after closing. The voice moves between two alternating threads, one in Paris and Saint-Malo, one in a German mining town and across the Eastern Front, with short chapters that keep a gentle, deliberate rhythm rather than a racing one. The mood is wistful and quietly aching, a kind of sun-bleached melancholy in which curiosity, craft and tenderness keep surfacing amid siege and fear. Violence occurs within the wartime setting: bombing, shooting and cruelty appear in some passages, and a few scenes of brutality are described plainly rather than lingered on, with no sexual content and no gore beyond what the war requires. Its arc follows two young people, each isolated in a different way, slowly drawn toward kindness. It suits a slow weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or a reader who wants a big historical novel that is intimate and patient. It is for readers who love immersive sensory writing, careful character study, and stories about small acts of decency in dark times.
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