All The Light We Cannot See

Genre: Historical

Book Type: Audio

Author: Anthony Doerr

Narrator: Zach Appelman

Pages / Length: 531 pages / 16 hours and 2 minutes

Publisher: Scribner (January 1, 2014) / Simon & Schuster Audio

Book Description:

From Anthony Doerr, the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning author of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller 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 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.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” ( San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Thoughts:

🎧 Audio 🎧

Let me start out by saying that I do not typically read Historical Fiction so I’m doing my best to review this objectively.

I heard wonderful things about this book, so am not sure if it is the combination of hearing how wonderful it is, combined with it not being my typical genre, but this was just ok for me (I know – unpopular opinion). I really enjoyed the end of this book because the pace quickened up, as the first 2/3 of the book could have been shorter. If I hadn’t been doing audio, I am not sure if I would have been able to finish this book.

While the story itself was strong and powerful, I enjoyed the multiple storylines and perspectives of the war and thought the characters were extremely well written, which is why I struggle rating this book. If you enjoy Historical Fiction, you will probably love this. Overall, I’m glad I read this, and think it’s worth a read.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

#Contemporary #drama #historicalfiction