All the Light We Cannot See

Book 2 of my 2019 Reading Challenge

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Summary (via the book jacket)

published 2014

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousand 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.

My Opinion

4 stars

When I sent my husband to the library with my list of requests, I also told him to surprise me.  He came home with 3 surprises, 2 of which I'd already read and this one which was on my "to-read" list but I hadn't gotten to yet.  He was bummed but I told him that shows how well he knows me since he picked things I'd already chosen on my own.  So that's how this random reader ended up with this selection at this time...

I liked the writing a lot but the book itself went slowly.  I felt like I was reading a lot and I would get sucked in but then I would put it down and it wouldn't seem like I had made any progress at all.  It was a very weird feeling; not necessarily a complaint since I liked it but just weird since it didn't seem like much was happening for how much I was reading yet I wasn't bored.  However, once the time jumps got closer together it picked up and the last third of the book passed by in a flash.

It wasn't the ending I wanted for some of the characters but I was satisfied with the journey.

A Few Quotes from the Book

"One week in Saint-Malo becomes two. Marie begins to feel that her life, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has been interrupted halfway through. There was volume 1, when Marie-Laure and her father lived in Paris and went to work, and now there is volume 2, when Germans ride motorcycles through these strange, narrow streets and her uncle vanishes inside his own home."

"Werner is succeeding. He is being loyal. He is being what everybody agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something."