Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A pretty depressing bingo

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 locksmith at a museum, and he creates for her a model of their neighbourhood, so […]

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10/15/2018 's CBR10 Review No:39 |

“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 to live in the seaside city of St Malo with her great (truly great) uncle […]

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3/14/2018 's CBR10 Review No:3 |

Not Atonement, But Still Great

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 German orphan with a younger sister. He is conscripted into military school as a teenager. […]

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2/18/2016 's CBR8 Review No:10 |

The Darkness of World War II

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 a young French girl who lives with her father in Paris. Her father works at […]

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1/11/2016 's CBR8 Review No:2 |

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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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 blind girl who lives with her father in a museum in France (I know, […]

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11/17/2015 's CBR7 Review No:228 |

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 another make sense and their stylistic construction adds to the story. 4. Good as character […]

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9/1/2015 's CBR7 Review No:126 |

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 because I felt invested or really wanted to see how the story ended. So I […]

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7/8/2015 's CBR7 Review No:28 |

I bought the hardback.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See has been on a lot of lists recently and I can certainly see why. Bear with me – I finished it a couple months ago, but have been too busy to write up any of my books, so I might not recall all the reasons it’s so wonderful. The novel centers around two main characters. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a young French girl who happens to be blind, and lives with her father in Paris in the early 1940s. Werner Pfennig is a young German orphan living with his younger sister and many […]

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6/4/2015 's CBR7 Review No:7 |


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