I finally got a copy of this one (I’ve been seeing recommendations for it for months) and it absolutely lived up to all the hype! “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” All the Light We Cannot See follows two young people in the years leading up to and during World War II. We meet Marie-Laure, […]
A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.
This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]
A Long Tale of Sight, Sound, and War
Let’s get this out of the way: All The Light is a long book. 531 pages long. This is the second longest book I’ve read this year (the winner of that award is still Afterwords) and man, it felt it. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book; it’s beautiful and visual and broken up into mostly short chapters of just a few pages, but it. is. long. Towards the end, this turned into a book that I was reading just to get through it, not […]
I bought the hardback.
Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See has been on a lot of lists recently and I can certainly see why. Bear with me – I finished it a couple months ago, but have been too busy to write up any of my books, so I might not recall all the reasons it’s so wonderful. The novel centers around two main characters. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a young French girl who happens to be blind, and lives with her father in Paris in the early […]