Dear Bookworms,
By now, many of you may be familiar with Anthony Doerr’s popular novel All the Light We Cannot See. Originally published in May of 2014, it quickly gained a place on the New York Times best seller list, and remains there even now. Readers, the praise this novel has received is not undue. 
Centering within the events of World War II, Doerr’s novel tells the stories of French girl Marie-Laure and German boy Werner and how both come to be in the city of Saint-Malo at the time when it is nearly decimated by Allied bombings. Both main characters are extremely well-developed and likable. Their simple realism being both identifiable and sympathetic as each struggles to make sense of the crumbling world around them, and their place in it. Werner is a kindhearted orphan, more interested in technology than in war, whose lack of guidance and conviction finds him conscripted into the German forces. Marie-Laure, the only child of a widowed Parisian, is a compellingly innocent girl through whose completely blind eyes, we as readers learn to see this world in a new way.
It was Doerr’s scenes of Marie-Laure that captured me the most, and in my opinion, the book is worth reading for this feature alone. His description of the world through her perspective is so rich with sounds, scents, and textures that I frequently found myself failing to picture the events of the story visually but imagining them as if I too were sightless.
The writing throughout is descriptive and beautiful, pulling you along as the story traverses the harsh aspects of the war, and gilding the cheerful portions with expressive phrase. The novel progresses its story through a series of titled vignettes rather than numbered chapters, with each section creating a scene and opening a window into each event in the tale.
Then, too, there is the mystery of the diamond that haunts its way through the pages of this book, and the question of whether it truly does possess the magic that the legends about it say it does. Does it really have the power to save them? Or is it the ultimate cause of all this disaster they face? I can only recommend that you read it, and decide for yourself.
Keep reading!
Live, Love, Learn,
Elise and The Write Teacher(s)