At first glance, All the Light We Cannot See
All the Light We Cannot See primarily follows two characters: Werner, a young German orphan who has the opportunity of attending a school for Hitler’s Youth rather than being sent into the coal mines, and Marie-Laure, a blind girl whose father works in Paris at the Natural History Museum.
I listened to the audio version of this book. It took a couple of CDs before I really got into the story, but once the book got past the initial lull, I couldn’t stop listening.
Doerr’s character development is wonderful. His characters are average people, but over the course of the story become beloved and interesting. The story line is not predictable, and I was surprised with the ending of each of the character’s stories.
The descriptions of France were tangible and were especially interesting as I imagined them from Marie-Laure’s blind perspective.
Gasps and sighs for the end of this book and its resolution. Truly, it’s a lovely story.
Parent’s guide:
- Sex: Some kissing between a boy and girl
- Language: a few swear words
- Violence: War scenes where people are shot and killed, disturbing scenes involving young children being forced to do violent things to other human beings
All the Light We Cannot See
Historical Fiction
Scribner
May 6, 2014
Audio
545
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.
