All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0007548699 Global Overview for this book
Registered by wingGoryDetailswing of Nashua, New Hampshire USA on 8/24/2018
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Journal Entry 1 by wingGoryDetailswing from Nashua, New Hampshire USA on Friday, August 24, 2018
I got this softcover from this Little Free Library in Salem NH while dropping off some books of my own, and was glad of another release copy.

The story unfolds from two main viewpoints (with a third popping up partway through), and shifting in time from an Allied bombardment of Saint-Malo in 1944 back to early days of the war, and even earlier times in the lives of the protagonists. (I rather like this kind of episodic, asynchronous storytelling, though depending on how it's handled it can build suspense or destroy it.)

The main characters are Marie-Laure, a French girl who lost her sight at age 6, and whose father used detailed miniature models of their home and surrounding buildings in Paris to help her learn her way around; and Werner, a German orphan who's a prodigy with radio technology, and who winds up in a school for Hitler Youth. (The brutality of the training there, mean to weed out the weak - often by triggering a mob-mentality in all the other students - is highlighted by the treatment of Werner's closest friend, the quiet, bird-watching Frederick, whose fate is truly tragic.)

All this could have made a fine story in itself, but there's an extra element: a rare and extremely valuable jewel, which is rumored to preserve the life of its owner - at the cost of bad luck and disaster to everyone the owner loves. The stone is in a museum, but when Paris comes under threat, plans are made to send out the stone and some identical duplicates in the hands of different people, in an attempt to save it from capture. We suspect early on that Marie-Laure's father keeps the genuine stone; will the curse take effect, if indeed it exists at all? And what does a curse matter in the middle of such a horrifying war?

The snippets of each character's lives as they grow, try to survive, and eventually find their paths intersecting in Saint-Malo, bring us into the story. Yet, oddly, the most suspenseful passages for me had to do with the third main character, a German officer who's learned of the jewel and, terminally ill himself, has been hunting down each copy in hopes of saving his own life. When he gets on the trail of Marie-Laure, the large-scale disaster turns into a small-scale suspense story...

The conclusion to the story comes in a series of epilogues, years and then decades later; it has some touching aspects, but is bittersweet at best.

[There's a TV Tropes page on the book.]

Journal Entry 2 by wingGoryDetailswing at LFL - Bourne St. (7) in Lowell, Massachusetts USA on Sunday, August 26, 2018

Released 5 yrs ago (8/26/2018 UTC) at LFL - Bourne St. (7) in Lowell, Massachusetts USA

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I left this in the Little Free Library; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

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