Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot  See, by Anthony Doerr

This is a book about war.

It's about the worst of war: The bigotry, the poison, the death. It's about the dirty business of war: The propaganda of hatred. The killing of one's humanity. The destruction of  innocence.

But it's also a book about redemption, about saving one's humanity, about overcoming fear and ignorance, and about accepting grace from your better angels.

In this book, we meet two players from World War II: Werner Pfennig, a German teenage boy living in an orphanage, who has a flair for electronics and mathematics, and the slightly younger Marie-Laure LeBlanc, 12 in 1940, a blind girl living in Paris with her father. Each has a cast of characters coming in and out of their lives. For Werner, it includes his sister Jutta, as smart and enterprising as he is, who simply cannot accept Werner's gradual assimilation into the Nazi regime, and his roommate Frederick, a sensitive boy and bird watcher who is considered too weak for the Third Reich. For Marie-Laure, a reluctant member of the resistance in Saint-Malo, France, where she is forced to flee, it includes her father, Daniel LeBlanc, who has dedicated his life to teaching her to survive in a sighted world, and her Uncle Etienne, a WWI veteran with lingering mental problems from that service, who strives to overcome his fears to protect Marie-Laure.

It also features a strange blue diamond, the Sea of Flames, said to be blessed and cursed, that becomes the focus of the lives of several characters in the book.

The story is told, in alternating chapters, from the perspectives of Werner and Marie-Laure. Their lives and experiences eventually intersect and intertwine, coming to several emotional encounters as the book reaches its climax.

Doerr won a Pulitzer prize for this novel, and it is easy to see why. It is sometimes a hard book to read, but ultimately, is worth the time and effort.