“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”–Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See
This powerful, Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr is remarkable as it tells the story of how the lives of a young girl from Paris and an orphan boy from Germany intersect as they both try to survive the devastation in occupied France.
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the keeper of its thousands of locks. When she is six years old, she becomes blind and her father builds her a perfect miniature of their neighborhood that she is able to memorize by touch so she can find her way safely home. The Nazis take over Paris when Marie-Laure is twelve and she and her father flee to the walled city, Saint-Malo, to live with her great uncle in his tall house by the sea. Amongst the small amount of belongings they carry with them is a jewel from the museum that is considered to be the most valuable and dangerous of all the jewels in its collection.
Werner, an orphan, grew up in a small mining town in Germany with his sister. When Werner comes across a radio, he is entranced by it and teaches himself how to build and repair these new devices. This skill initially earns him the dubious honor of being selected to attend a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, and later qualifies him for a special assignment to track the resistance. As he becomes more aware of the people dying because of his tracking, Werner is desperate for a change. He travels through war torn France and ends up in Saint-Malo where his path will converge with that of Marie-Laure.
Doerr’s novel is beautifully written and deftly weaves the threads of multiple characters together to create a layered tapestry of human connectedness and people trying to do right by one another, even in the most trying of circumstances.
Netflix made a mini-series of this book and it is okay. If you saw the mini-series, but haven’t read the book, please read it. It is much better than the tv adaptation.
Content Advisory: Bullying, violence, Anti-Semitism, rape, language, war descriptions