As bombs rain down from the Saint-Malo sky, young German boy Warner questions where his loyalties lie, while Marie-Laure, a French girl, struggles to navigate a blind world void of light and color. In his Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, author Anthony Doerr constructs a tragically beautiful story illustrating two separate children’s lives as they come of age in Europe during World War II.
Warner grew up in Germany but was taken from his home and placed into a Nazi institution for the military training of young German boys. The German military notice his talent for repairing radios, and they send him to the French town of Saint-Malo to put his abilities to use.
A few hundred miles away, Marie-Laure is a French girl who went blind at a young age. Her life is spent trying to gain a new understanding of the world, one without her eyes to see with. When Paris begins to be bombed, she is forced to evacuate to Saint-Malo to stay with her uncle. The story becomes increasingly more complex when the two children’s lives become rapidly intertwined.
The suspense leading up to Warner and Marie-Laure’s first meeting builds up throughout the novel which keeps the reader engaged. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anybody else who enjoys historical (specifically WWII) fiction. Although it starts out slightly slow and takes a while for the plot to develop, I think All the Light We Cannot See is overall worth spending your time reading, and you would not regret picking it up.
Comments