From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

Start date: June 15, 2015

Finish date: July 1, 2015

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

* The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
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What Members Thought

May 06, 2014 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it liked it

Shelves: around-the-world, league-extraordinary-dorks, location-france, location-germany, pulitzer, international-book-club, read2015

This book was selected for two of my book clubs this year - one for August and one for September. Since it seems like everyone I know has read this book, it must be time! I actually wouldn't have read it otherwise, unless I'd gone on a Pulitzer Prize Winners spree, which could happen. I've never had so many comments prior to writing a review as I have with this book.

I feel similarly to this book as I felt about The Goldfinch, but at least Donna Tartt told a story I hadn't heard before - the paci This book was selected for two of my book clubs this year - one for August and one for September. Since it seems like everyone I know has read this book, it must be time! I actually wouldn't have read it otherwise, unless I'd gone on a Pulitzer Prize Winners spree, which could happen. I've never had so many comments prior to writing a review as I have with this book.

I feel similarly to this book as I felt about The Goldfinch, but at least Donna Tartt told a story I hadn't heard before - the pacing, the storytelling, the fast pace that moves the reader quickly through hundreds and hundreds of pages. I read the book in two days, along with other things I was reading.

It's confusing why so many authors write novels about World War Two. I keep waiting for one of these novels with so much hype to have something unique to it. This is a well researched story, very placed in a specific city or two, with at least one interesting character (Werner, the German kid who is good with radios), but the overarching story is the same old thing - the same villains, the same outcome, the same deterioration of daily life. It might be that historical fiction is not my favorite, but just last year I read a WW2 novel that felt fresh - The Undertaking by Audrey Magee. So I know it can be done.

The Pulitzer judges referred to it as a "page turner." Any author can turn a book into a "page turner" by writing short chapters, as Doerr has done. He also moves backwards and forwards between a period before the war, the two main characters' childhoods (even farther back), and during the war. As a reader, I kept reading because there was not a good place to stop and I didn't know what to expect to come next. In Anthony Marra's great book A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, the author does this because of something important that is only revealed near the end of the book, but not the chronological end. It was an important storytelling approach in that case. In this novel, I think the story is the same either way, and would have preferred alternating chapters between Werner and Marie-Laure from their childhood into the future. This would have allowed for a more cohesive story, but also the author could have better developed the other characters, who are rather shallow and serve more as props throughout the novel.

The end of the book moves to 1974 for one chapter and 2014 for another, in an unnecessary epilogue. I think maybe it is to leave the reader feeling okay about the characters, but it may have been more poignant to leave certain storylines unresolved. That is the reality of war, particularly a war so far-reaching as this one. ...more

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May 17, 2015 Loretta rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reading-for-craft

Such a beautiful, heartbreaking, wonderful book. I stayed up way too late last night to finish it, because once you get to a certain point there is simply no possibility of putting it down. Maybe I'll have more words for it later. Beautiful. ...more

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Aug 24, 2014 Jennifer rated it really liked it

A beautifully written book set during WWII. Marie Laure is a blind French girl who lives with her father, the master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. They flee to the walled city of Saint-Malo when the Germans take over France.

Werner is a German orphan with an unusual talent for radios that leads him to a military academy and then a place in a unit that tracks Resistance fighters. Their paths eventually converge.

My only complaint about the book is that the middle section seems to ta ...more

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