Let's Bust a Recap : All the Light We Cannot See

I picked up All the Light We Cannot See a couple of years ago at Powell's in Portland, Oregon. It was a fun find because this hardcover edition was cheaper than all the paperback editions on the shelf. I brought it home and actually put it on my 2019 book list just a few months later, but I didn't get around to reading it last year. After so many people told me I should not put it off, it ended up on my book list again in 2020, and in August I finally read it. 

I know I'm late to the party, but wow. I was hooked from the beginning and told my dad he should read it after I was done as I happened to be visiting him in North Carolina at the time. He started to skim it and then had the nerve to try to hide it from me. After I actually finished it, he read it. Then my Gramma read it. Then my mom read it.

We all recommend it.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr was published in 2014 and spent 130 consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. The New York Times then included it in its 10 Best Books of the Year, it was a National Book Award finalist, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. 

Set mainly in occupied France during WWII, the story spans from 1934 all the way to 2014. The book opens during the 1944 bombing of Saint-Malo on the Emerald Coast of Brittany. We are introduced to a blind French girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc and a young German soldier named Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure has fled Paris with her father to stay with her reclusive great-uncle in the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, while Werner has come through the ranks of the Hitler Youth with a special talent for building and fixing radios. Throughout the novel, Doerr flashes back and forth between the past leading up to the bombing, and the bombing itself until the past finally catches up with the main storyline. And let me tell you, the man knows how to leave you on a cliffhanger then flash you back eight years in time which has you racing through the book, trying to get back to what's going on directly after the bombing. The last two sections of the book give us a glimpse into the future with a bit from 1974 and then finally 2014. 

J.R. Moehringer said, "Doerr sees the world as a scientist, but feels it as a poet." In All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr would describe in detail the inner workings of a radio or an intricate lock system, but then in the next sentence, pen a unique turn of phrase or make a keen observation of human nature that would leave my heart aching. He juxtaposed the cruel, brutality of war with the absolute breathtaking beauty of nature in a jarring yet somehow seamless way, and I was captivated with his writing. While I have a couple of friends who told me they didn't make it very far into this one, I was enthralled from the first page and had a hard time putting this book down. I definitely get the hype surrounding it, and I'm glad I read it. While the writing is unsentimental, and the content heartbreaking, Doerr manages to bring us an ultimately uplifting and compelling story, and I was here for it.

With all that being said and as much as I highly recommend this novel, I have to point out it's just that: a novel. WWII was a real and horrendous time in history, and as much as I enjoy a good story, I try to balance my reading of that time period with nonfiction accounts of real people and their stories. If you haven't read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom or Night by Elie Wiesel or Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, please don't miss out on them because you think they might be dry or too hard to read. The market seems to be pretty saturated with WWII fiction (and believe me, I own my fair share of it), but the real life accounts are so important for us to read and remember. I'm currently reading The Diary of Anne Frank and plan to share about it here soon. 

Have you read All the Light We Cannot See or some other novel set during WWII that you thought was outstanding? Do you like reading historical fiction or do you try to stick to facts? I have a whole shelf full of books centering around that particular time in our history and it's still amazing to me how it affected every corner of our world.