All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.” 

                                                                               ...

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.                                                                               ...
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.” 

                                                                               ...

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?” 

                                                                               ...

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).

It took me two attempts to start reading this book. The first time I had only read the blurb and a few chapters of my kindle sample, but went no further than the first chapter - I was on the lookout for my next 'great' read that would hook me in and I wasn't in the mood for a war story. But I kept reading great reviews and saw how many of my friends rated it so highly, so then came my second, more successful, sitting to read it.

It is very beautifully written with a lot of detail, but not in an overly heavy way. It was easy for me to imagine myself walking down the cobbled streets of Saint-Malo. I loved how it was creatively crafted and flowed a little differently than I was expecting - it was still easy to follow and kept me interested. 

The thing that stuck with me the most in this story is the internal dialogue of Marie-Laure and Werner. At the end of the day they are just two kids who are caught up in a war that they don't want to be a part of, and how it was written made the story all the more real and enchanting.