All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I finished All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr this week. I sat for a long time after remembering some of the lyrical prose from this beautifully written story. Before we move on, let me indulge you with the prose I was allowing to roll around my head for a time.

 “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” 

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

 “His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.” 

 “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.” 

This is a story about parallel lives of a boy and a girl in their teens living in two different countries, Germany and France during WW2. 

Marie Laure lives with her papa  in Paris, he is master of the keys in the Museum of Natural History. Marie Laure goes to the museum every day with him to learn everything she can by touching. Marie Laure is blind. 

Once the Germans were beginning to occupy Paris, Marie Laure and her papa flee to get as far away as they can. They head east. For two reasons, something that  Papa possessed and their survival. They end up in St. Malo. A city surrounded by sea walls at a distance North of  Normandy Beach. They move in with an agoraphobic elderly  uncle in a tall narrow house by the sea wall. 

Paralleling Marie Laure is Werner, he is a young German boy who loves to tinker with all kinds of things, he is gifted in turning  a smattering of materials into something that runs, like radios.  He lives in a loving but bleak orphanage with his sister, Jutta. He gets plucked up by  the Germans and sent to a barbaric  boarding school where life is hard. Werner grapples between the do or die patriotism and the rational words of his younger sister.

The reader goes back and forth  between the past and present to build up the story. It is not confusing or hard to keep up with. The story is a compelling one, a reader would not forget a single moment between the two main characters.

The book will surprise the reader in  many ways. It's a peripheral story of WW2, not unlike The Book Thief, however, both stories are vastly different.  It takes the reader into other ares that were affected devastatingly by the war but away from concentration camps, not that they are dismissed in any way. You feel the sadness and desperation of the people is quite the same even on the periphery.

One more thing:
The third character: St. Malo.
St Malo is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I suggest a Google search of its' entirety before you read the book.

Buy it.