May 2014

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr is oh so beautiful. Set during World War II, Marie-Laure is a young blind girl living in Paris with her father, who is a master of locks at the Museum of Natural History. His job has him in charge of some of their most valued works. He constructs a miniature model of the streets of Paris for Marie-Laure to study so she can navigate the world around her. When she is 12, the Germans move into the city, and they are forced to flee to the town of Saint-Malo, where a reclusive uncle lives by the sea. And Marie-Laure must learn to navigate a whole new world. In a parallel story, a young orphan boy named Werner lives with his sister in Germany and is tapped to be part of the Hitler Youth, eventually given a role to breach the Resistance.

The book is wonderful from the start, but as their two stories crescendo together, the last 100 pages are just brilliant. The voices here are stunning, and the writing is alternatively crisp and lush. Picturing Marie-Laure’s dark world illuminated with words will make a booklover’s heart swell.

Nearly 70 years after D-Day, Doerr delivers a book that sheds new light on the people whose lives were ripped apart by World War II. As a bookseller friend noted when she saw I was reading the book, “It's been quite a while since a WWII novel captivated me quite like it did.”

Doerr took 10 years to write ALL THE WORLD WE CANNOT SEE; it took one week of reading for me to select it as a Bookreporter.com Bets On selection. Trust that your soul will be illuminated after reading it.