I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Pages: 531
Published by Scribner
Publication Date May 6th 2014
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book, National Book Award finalist, more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. 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, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. 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).
Reviews Done Quick
All The Light We Cannot See was one of the most hyped-up books when it was released in 2014 and even won a Pulitzer Prize. Sadly, I didn’t see it. I tried desperately but I just couldn’t get into it. It felt pretentious and had an Oscar (or in this case Pulitzer) Bait vibe to it.
Despite their grandiose storylines none of the characters stood out to me, and I had to look through the synopsis to recall the main character’s names (Marie-Laure and Werner in case you were wondering).
I may be in the minority with this one but I feel that All the Light We Cannot See missed the mark.
I’m a hundred pages into it and feel exactly the same. I had read other work by Doerr that is remarkable, Memory Wall, but this is leaving me cold. I concur with a review that I read, that fantasy and myth get in the way of history.