Bingo Square: Award Winner In August of 1944, Saint-Malo in France is under siege. 16 year old Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, is trying to survive the bombing and hide from someone who is searching for her. 18 year old Werner, a German solider, is trapped in the rubble of a hotel. From this starting point we go back several years, to Marie-Laure first losing her sight, and Werner’s childhood in an orphanage with his younger sister. Marie-Laure lives with her father, a […]
“Like egrets, like terns, like starlings”
I am reluctant to share the plot details of All the Light We Cannot See for fear of spoiling the experience that is unspooling this beautiful novel. This is a dual narrative, switching back and forth between a young man in Germany and a young woman in France during WWII. Werner, a brilliant orphan with hair as white as schnee, is a radio-repairing engineering genius who finds himself in the German army while Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, flees occupied Paris with her beloved father […]
Not Atonement, But Still Great
Well damn. This book, you guys. This book will maybe haunt me. As far as war-related novels that I will remember, it ranks only behind Atonement. I appreciated that it was, I feel, a really well-told story. Others have reviewed it for CBR before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a quick synopsis. A young girl Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father, a museum curator, in Paris before the war. They flee when Paris is invaded by Germany. Werner is a […]
The Darkness of World War II
All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr may have suffered from unrealistically high expectations. I’ve been waiting to read it for months, I’ve heard great things about it from a number of different people, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. Don’t get me wrong. This was a well-written and haunting book. However, after all the hype, I was expecting it to be one of my favorites of the year. World War II is the backdrop for our two young protagonists. Marie Laure is […]
All the Light We Cannot See
I finally got a copy of this one (I’ve been seeing recommendations for it for months) and it absolutely lived up to all the hype! “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?” All the Light We Cannot See follows two young people in the years leading up to and during World War II. We meet Marie-Laure, […]
A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.
This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]