Wednesday, August 27, 2014

All the Light We Cannot See

This new release from Anthony Doerr has been climbing the charts so I decided to check it out for myself.

Source

Good Reads' Synopsis: "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 I Thought: I wasn't sure how to take the short, snippet chapters at first but in the end, I liked that style for hopping back and forth between Werner and Marie-Laure. I found myself anticipating the part where they would inevitably meet up and what would happen after that. I loved Marie-Laure's independence and Werner's wishes to be back with his sister. I really Doerr's writing and the story. If you like historical fiction, especially during WWII, you'll like this one a lot.

Rating: * * *

No comments:

Post a Comment

I want to hear what you have to say. Really!