All The Light We Cannot See

Synopsis (from Amazon): From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, 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).

One (or more) Sentence Summary: The Book Thief + The Da Vinci Code.  My sister recommend All The Light We Cannot See and I have no idea why, but I thought it was about aliens.  This books is truly, WOW!  So amazingly intertwined and cleverly written.  I just LOVED it!

Favorite Character(s):  Maure-Laure is my favorite character, even though there were several others I truly enjoyed.  I can't believe what she went through and was blind as well.  She can do wrong in my book!

Fast read/slow read:  Super, super fast.

Cover:  Given I thought the book was about aliens, I do not really care for the cover.

What Others Are Saying:  USA Today - Sharon Peters

“This tough-to-put-down book proves its worth page after lyrical page…Each and every person in this finely spun assemblage is distinct and true.”

NPR - Alan Cheuse

“Doerr is an exquisite stylist; his talents are on full display.”

New Yorker

“Intricate… A meditation on fate, free will, and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.”

Would I Read Other Books by the Author:  Sign me up right away.

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. He is also the author of two story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won four O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

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All The Light We Cannot See