Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A white whale that’s worth reading, years later

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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I kept seeing this book everywhere when it came out/ won the Pulitzer in 2015. It has taken me a good number of years to get around to it, but I’m so glad I did. I picked this one up in November, which is Remembrance Day/ Veterans Day month, so a WWII book seemed fitting. Doerr’s story follows two adolescents living in challenging times on opposite sides of WWII: Marie-Laure, a blind girl living in Paris with her father, and Werner, an boy living in […]

A recommendation that was a good change of pace

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Cityscape: there’s the city of Saint-Malo on the front! I originally had this as a four star novel, but I’ve knocked it down to three stars due to Doerr’s use of short, different-POV chapters to generate suspense, which I’ve come to realize it’s one of my least favorite mechanisms to generate suspense and tension. And in a book like this–where we are in literal Nazi occupied France, late stages of war–it’s almost unnecessary. But it does let you elongate smaller sections of action into more […]

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Cbr13bingo Cityscape, bingo #4 Row 1 The Pulitzer-Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, set during WWII, is the story of two teenagers who share an unusual connection. Marie-Laure Leblanc is blind and trying to survive the war in St. Malo, France. Werner Pfennig is an orphan with a genius for math and engineering in Zollverein, Germany. While they are on opposite sides of the war, they share a love of science, knowledge, and the world. Yet when we meet them, during the […]

“Stranger, Whoever you are, Open this to learn what will amaze you”

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthoy Doerr

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Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is an epic story.  My ARC copy was over 600 pages long.  Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Price for All The Light We Cannot See, has woven together the stories of five people in three different times, connected with a sixth story, the ancient Greek story of Cloud Cuckoo Land. In modern day Idaho we have Zeno,  an old man, orphaned at a young age, who was changed by his experience as a POW during the Korean War.   Along with […]

There’s a Good YA Novel in Here Somewhere…

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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This was one of those books that I picked up on a whim in the reading room downstairs while I was waiting on some library loans. “Pulitzer Prize,” I thought. “This will probably not suck.” And it definitely doesn’t suck. But it did take me nearly a month to read, and for a 530-page work of fiction — a pageturner it was not, at least for me. The setup: Two teenagers, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig, come of age in 1930s France and Germany respectively. […]

Opacities (Blackout Bingo, Award winners)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Ok, I had half started this review for my penultimate bingo square, and then realized that I almost missed the opportunity to make this book LITERALLY TITLED ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE AND FEATURING A BLIND PROTAGONIST my blackout finish. Luckily I realized my error in time to finish strong. This book follows Marie-Laure, a girl with congenital cataracts which have left her blind, in Nazi-occupied France. Her father, a locksmith for the Museum, is one of four employees sent with a priceless gem […]



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