ARTFUL READERS CLUB
"All the Light We Cannot See"
by Anthony Doerr
June 26, 2015
Hi Artful Readers and all those who enjoy good books! I hope this month has found you reading some wonderful books that have captured your hearts and imaginations.
I'd like to review one of my most favorites in a long time...a breakout literary hit in 2014 that took the author a decade to research and write. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE has some of the most hauntingly beautiful prose I've ever read: strong, caring characters, loving relationships and people who touched each others lives during the trying times of WWII.
It's a story of childhood, interrupted by war.
Parallel stories are told in alternating chapters, of Marie Laure, a bright, curious, blind French girl and Werner Pfennig, an orphaned German boy with a brilliant mind and a talent for working with radios. In fast moving, short chapters, it's a story of their lives: coming from vastly different family backgrounds, in different countries... childhood and adolescence, until one brief moment when their lives collide during the bombing of a French city... and their stories weave together.
Yes, this is ANOTHER book about WWII, but Doerr created an image of war that I've never before imagined fully. I really got a sense of what it must have been like for children who lived happy lives to suddenly find themselves restricted in so many ways and pushed into directions they would not have chosen... directions at odds with who they were.
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE... I highly recommend this book not only for it's story value, but for the incredibly beautiful poetic depiction of a time that held so much ugliness.
"Now it seems there are only shadows
and silence. Silence is the fruit of the
occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps
from gutters...so many windows are dark.
It's as if the city has become a library
of books in an unknown language,
the houses, great shelves of illegible
volumes... the lamps all extinguished."
"All the Light We Cannot See"
