Review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Magic. Pure magic.

This book…I’m almost at a loss for words! If you haven’t yet read All the Light We Cannot See, it’s imperative that you put it on your TBR list this instant.

Anthony Doerr’s brilliant and captivating style of writing and story-telling blew me away. I was enthralled with the story and the characters from the moment I started reading, and couldn’t put this book down!

The story is a World War II story, but it’s so much more than that. It’s so deeply human…cares, loves, curiosities, passions, yearnings, growing up. All of this is weaved into the parallel stories of two main characters, Marie-Laure and Werner. One French, one German, both swept up in opposite sides of the war in life-altering ways. Both children, both forced to grow up before they should have. The stories start in parallel, and then you get these expertly crafted wisps of the stories being somehow connected, and you watch as they slowly inch their way toward intersecting.

The way Doerr uses light throughout the book captivated me. It’s the visible light that Marie-Laure can only see inside her brain due to her blindness, the creative spark of light inside the minds of children, the way a character near the end turns on all her lights to look as if she’s expecting someone, rather then being lonely – all of this and so many more uses of light were just brilliant. If I was still in college and writing a paper on this book, I would have gone all sorts of crazy with post-its and underlining, and it would have been awesome.

Doerr’s prose is poetic at times. He inserts these quick little lines within paragraphs that add such an amazing quality and lightness, like when Marie-Laure runs up the stairs in the house in Saint-Malo:

Second floor, third fourth fifth.

Another reason I think one of I love Doerr’s prose so much is because, writing from the point of view of a blind child, he has to describe so much by sound and feel, and he does it so beautifully:

Madame Manec’s energy, Marie-Laure is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concepts bisques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.

Just gorgeous. I could go on and on, but I don’t want to give anything away in case you, fair reader, haven’t yet picked up All the Light We Cannot See. As for me, I’m going to head on over to my bio page and add this book to the list of ones that I love, because I loved it that much!

Have you read the book? What did you think? Let me know in the comments…I’d love to chat about it!! Luckily it’s my book club book this month, so I’ll get to talk about it at our meeting later this month while I scarf the amazing mashed potatoes at Kieren’s Irish Pub in downtown Minneapolis :]

Joli

I'm currently a full-time writer/content strategist with an English degree living in Minneapolis, MN with my husband, young daughter, and black lab mix. I created Literary Quicksand to feed my love of books, writing, and community.

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