All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

544 pages

English language

Published Nov. 21, 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited.

ISBN:: 978-0-00-813830-1

(166 reviews)

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

33 editions

pithypants reviewed All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Review of 'All the Light We Cannot See' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

There's so much about this book that made me want to love it... namely the details. Stylistically, in many ways this book employs many of the techniques that made Amelie such a rich movie. There were many quirky elements - a blind girl growing up in Paris, small model replicas of the town in which she lives, a curse, radio broadcasting, etc.

And yet, for some reason I found it a bit hard to track what was actually happening. I'm not sure if it's because the perspective shifted back and forth so rapidly between two stories (blind French girl vs. German military orphan) or if it's because I was listening to this book rather than reading it. That's why I'm not giving a full five stars, but I suspect that if I were to sit and read it with focus, I could nudge it up to a five-star read.

markm reviewed All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Review of 'All the Light We Cannot See' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I found this ultimately disappointing, but good enough so that I read the whole thing. The parallel stories of the characters telegraph upcoming plot points and they tempt us to hope for a relationship that can never be. Often seems contrived and melodramatic in a cinematic way, and I think this could make a very good movie - I note that one of the other Goodreads reviewers mentions Spielberg, and I certainly agree. It did remind me of my own fascination with radio as a child, and the deep importance and value of radio in a world without other similar forms of long distance communication.