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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 […]

“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 […]

“Like egrets, like terns, like starlings”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 […]

A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 […]

A Long Tale of Sight, Sound, and War

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Let’s get this out of the way: All The Light is a long book. 531 pages long. This is the second longest book I’ve read this year (the winner of that award is still Afterwords) and man, it felt it. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book; it’s beautiful and visual and broken up into mostly short chapters of just a few pages, but it. is. long. Towards the end, this turned into a book that I was reading just to get through it, not […]

Not as Illuminating as the Title Would Suggest

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Marie-Laure is a blind Parisian girl whose father works at the Museum of Natural History.  When she goes blind at age 6, her father builds a to-scale model of their neighborhood so she can learn her way around gradually.  Then the Nazis occupy Paris.  They flee to Saint-Malo, where they find refuge with extended relatives, Madame Manec and shell-shocked Etienne.  Oh, and Marie-Laure’s father carries a jewel with him that may or may not be magical but is most certainly valuable, which is sought tirelessly by a German jeweler, von Rumpel.  Meanwhile, […]



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