A webinar speaker recommended All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and right away, I got lost in the drama of Marie-Laure LeBlanc and her father living in France. I counted the steps through the streets of Paris, trying to imagine what navigation would be like for a blind woman. The relationship between this father and daughter touched me. Marie’s father created a miniature model of the town so she could feel where the buildings, steps in the sidewalk, urns on the street, and landmarks were to aid in her navigation.
Reading this novel was like sucking on a piece of dark chocolate candy and having it last for 530 pages or more than 13 hours of audio pleasure. The elegant prose took my breath away. Doerr is a stylistic master and employs vivid and powerful verbs that plant readers directly into the storyline.
Zach Appelman, an excellent narrator, convinced me as a listener with his authentic English, German, and French accents that kept me totally engaged in the storyline without questioning their realism. Keeping a male narrator’s voice throughout worked beautifully in this historical fiction because of the quality of the narration.
One of my favorite themes in this story dealt with the moral quandary that German orphan Werner Pfennig struggled with concerning his friend, Frederick, a bird-loving, weaker boy who stood up and said to his burly German commandant and cadets, “Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.” In training, Werner avoids standing up for his friend, and in his suffering, fellow readers and I suffer with the question: how much do we allow people to mistreat us or others before taking up the fight?
If you enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, you may also enjoy Strangers in Time: A World War II Novel, All the Broken Places by John Boyne, and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.
