All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Publication Date:  May 6, 2014
Publisher:  Scribner
Pages:  530
Series:  Stand Alone
Genre:  Historical Fiction
Synopsis:  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.

Review:  Falling in love with this book is not a difficult thing.  A handful of sentences in and you're enchanted.  Without a doubt, this is a novel that is nothing short of exceptional.  For it is one thing to fall in love with a book, but an entirely separate thing altogether to be aware of the fall at all.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before the close forever.

The words are powerful but always concise. They never drag on into irrelevant territory. There is a certain eloquence that captivates you, pulls you into this ethereal place where time does not exist.  It is such a lovely and fragile thing.  

The imagery isn't simply images--descriptions of colors and scents--but conjures a sense of existing within the story, just as real as any fictional thing can be.  This, among a myriad of others, is why this book matters.  It isn't a history--it's a story.  There is an astounding and often unrecognized difference.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

The amount of detail, not in the battles themselves, but in the lives those battles affect is extraordinary, exquisite, excellent--all of the words beginning with ex.  Not only this, but it exemplifies the injustice of it all.  What the war did to the world, to people, to children.  How it warped them so that even the most compassionate turn to killing.  How far will you go when you have no choices left?

The plot is framed around two children--Werner and Marie-Laure--both victims of World War II and each on opposing sides of the war.  Werner: dreamer, genius, Nazi.  Marie Laure: blind, clever, strong.  The war changed both of their lives in unimaginable and irreversible ways.  I am fond of them both and of the characters that shaped their stories.  The singular flaw is that the pacing was quite slow, although that in itself allows you the time to appreciate what it is you are reading.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

All the Light We Cannot See is not one I will soon forget.  It is one of the very few I hope endure to be read generations later.  It is poignant novel about humanity and the loss of it.  Everyone was a victim in that war, even the villains.  It is bittersweet and infinite. Maybe you cannot see light, but you can certainly read of it in this book.

4.5 Keys