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alobear ([personal profile] alobear) wrote2018-11-22 09:41 pm

All The Light We Cannot See

I don't remember where I first heard about this book, but the universe told me to read it next by having someone on my train reading it last week, and then immediately also recommending it to me on Amazon. So, who was I to argue?

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is the tale of a young, blind French girl, and a young uncertain German boy, and how their experiences of World War Two eventually intersect. It's an intricately structured novel, with all the chapters being less than four pages long, and yet it fits together beautifully, like the wooden puzzle boxes the girl's father makes for her every year for her birthday.

It's sad and poignant and lovely and brutal - and also incredibly tense in a lot of sections, particularly when the girl is hiding in the attic of her great-uncle's house, and a German officer is searching below for something she has in her pocket.

I loved the way it all eventually came together, though I thought the end of one of their stories was unnecessarily arbitrary - though perhaps that was a deliberate portrayal of the nature of war.

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