To enhance our WWII unit, and to learn more about the many perspectives we chose one of three books to read. Our three choices were Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand,  Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I had heard from my mother that All the Light We Cannot See was good, so I listened to her and chose it.

When we started talking about book reviews we read a few from The New York Times. One review of Cory Doctorow’ Little Brother stood out to me because it had a good summary and a good expression of opinion, that review is below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/books/review/Grossman-t.html

Then we get to my review, I liked this because it was a way to express opinion and show writing skills, two things that I am good at. So, without further ado here is my review of All the Light We Cannot See.

All the Light We Cannot See

Review
Adam Gerbrecht

Anthony Doerr did not write a book. He ran a triathlon. In Doerr’s past books like About Grace, we follow one perspective of one character. Even in books where we follow multiple storylines at once we have all 5 senses to follow. We can learn what the character sees, hears, feels, touches, and smells, this imagery takes us into the story. In the case of this book though, the two characters of Werner Pfenning and Marie-Laure LeBlanc could not be more different. Simply because with Marie-Laure we lose our most reliable sense. Sight. That sounds like it makes it complicated for the reader and easier for the writer, but in my opinion it is the opposite. It is easy for us to understand because of the triathlon that Doerr has to run to write this, was done well. What did he do first? Made us see a world through someone who cannot see.

How did he do it? In my opinion, flawlessly. Even though Marie-Laure has no sense of sight, inside her head we still learn of what she ‘sees.’ I love the words and colors that Doerr uses to describe her father in chapter 17: “Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.” When we are inside the sight-robbed mind of Marie-Laure our imaginations fill with colors, shapes, sounds, and smells. All of these emphasized perfectly to make up simple physical descriptions that you often get when following a character through a novel.

The next part that would have been difficult for Doerr is showing two such different sides. Two different sides of the war, two different cities, and two very different people. Yet, he still manages to find similar emotions, experiences and thoughts between Werner and Marie-Laure. They both have a slight confusion, a lack of motivation and understanding. The war confuses Marie-Laure because she obviously cannot see what is happening and changing around her, but Werner’s confusion is more isolation rather than inability. He has lived in his own little small world, worrying about his own small problems his whole life, that changes when the Fuhrer needs boys like himself, boys to breed into ‘Hitler’s children.’ And then there is Marie-Laure’s confusion. When the Germans start the invasion of France, Marie-Laure doesn’t see the gradual physical changes, so when the changes turn from gradual to extreme, she has to try and understand very quickly.

Lastly, there’s how he brought it all together. Throughout the book we also follow a smaller story line involving a mineralogist named Von Rumpel. He is on a quest to find ‘The Sea of Flames,’ possessed by Marie-Laure’s father, but he too is battling his own problems. Throughout the book his perspective seams unnecessary and boring, but he brings the two characters together when they need to most, and he is the influential part in the connection that our two heroes make.

In the end, this book was a lot. It had a lot of good, but it also had its dose of confusing too. The drastically different narrative between Werner and Marie-Laure is hard to understand for the beginning of the story, this makes the rest of the book a bit hard to connect to the characters. Beside the slight confusion, the middle and final sections of this book tie together nicely into one big, impactful story that shows the small happy things in a big, ugly war.