Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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There’s a Good YA Novel in Here Somewhere…

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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This was one of those books that I picked up on a whim in the reading room downstairs while I was waiting on some library loans. “Pulitzer Prize,” I thought. “This will probably not suck.” And it definitely doesn’t suck. But it did take me nearly a month to read, and for a 530-page work of fiction — a pageturner it was not, at least for me. The setup: Two teenagers, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig, come of age in 1930s France and Germany respectively. […]

Opacities (Blackout Bingo, Award winners)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Ok, I had half started this review for my penultimate bingo square, and then realized that I almost missed the opportunity to make this book LITERALLY TITLED ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE AND FEATURING A BLIND PROTAGONIST my blackout finish. Luckily I realized my error in time to finish strong. This book follows Marie-Laure, a girl with congenital cataracts which have left her blind, in Nazi-occupied France. Her father, a locksmith for the Museum, is one of four employees sent with a priceless gem […]

A pretty depressing bingo

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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 […]

“Like egrets, like terns, like starlings”

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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 […]

Not Atonement, But Still Great

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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 […]



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