All the Light We Cannot See Paperback – 1 January 2017

The story is written in a non-linear fashion and covers the years 1934-2014…It’s 1934. Marie-Laurie Le Blanc lives in Paris and is six years old when she loses her eyesight and for the first time learns about the priceless “Sea of Flames”- an accursed gemstone with a brilliant blue color and a touch of red at it’s center which lays hidden for the past 200 years in the vaults of the National Museum of Natural History, where Marie’s father, Daniel Le Blanc works as the principle locksmith. Marie shares a very tender and solicitous relationship with her father. Her father builds her a small and an artistic model of the city in which they live, gets her books in Braille, makes her solve ingenious puzzles and tries his best to make Marie-Laurie capable of living life on her own. Her father, with strong dedication and utmost determination, tries to make sure that nothing stops his little chérie from pursuing her dreams and flying high.Werner Pfennig is an eight year old German albino boy who lives with his sister Jutta at an orphanage in Zollverein, Germany. Since his very childhood, Werner has been extremely inquisitive and agog about things going on around him. He shows great enthusiasm and love for radios, transmitters, electronics and mathematics which eventually leads him to acquire schooling in the National Political Institutes of Education. Though he’s thrilled to escape the sentence of working in the mines and dying young like his father, and is delighted to be able to study in the open and tinker with the radios, Werner gradually finds himself all caught up and cornered in the brutality and malevolence of the premier school of Hitler’s Youth.In 1940 as the German hostility advances and Marie and her father, who has been entrusted with the “Sea of Flames”, escape Paris and take shelter in Saint Malo where Marie’s great uncle, Etienne Le Blanc resides, their lives take an unexpected and unsolicited turn and Marie-Laurie some years down the line bumps into the eighteen year old, field expert, Werner Pfennig.What happens next? Will Werner and Marie be able to survive the devastation of the global war? Can they succeed against all odds? Or shall they give into their wretched fate? Shall the “Sea of Flames” cast it’s spell?It will take me one whole day if I get to start talking about this book in particular. There are so many entangled feelings and emotions harboring in me rn that it becomes hard to express myself, really. My heart aches, I am totally bewitched and it’s gonna take me a while before I start reading another book! I simply loved everything about this book. The chapters are short, hardly 2-3 pages long and it makes sure that no reader develops a sense of apathy while proceeding. I loved how Doerr gave a clear insight into the world of Marie-Laurie and Werner Pfennig. I could literally get blind, for a moment, like Marie and feel the things just as she did! Nazi Germany, it’s hostility, malevolence, the lives of the innocents lost, love and power, everything allured me to such an extent that it left me in a complete state of melancholia and tears. This book is certainly not a conventional war story. There’s so much more to it! The radiant beauty of the prose and the intricate details of the things going around, add up to the fine quality of the novel. It was like I am experiencing the haunting era of the WWII. I guess that’s the power of writing. Isn’t it?It took me 5 days to complete the book and 3 days to be done with the review. I literally restrained myself from writing too much and giving out the spoilers. When you a love a book so much, then it gets really hard to express your feelings about it! You fall out of the correct words and actually fail to explain how you feel about it!! And that’s what is happening with me rn lol.I am sure this novel would indeed be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or a beach holiday ahead. This is a complete page-turner, certainly unputdownable and an entirely absorbing piece of work! I can’t thank the author much for giving me this priceless experience! You guys won’t believe how desperately I want you people to read it! Recommending this novel to all the book lovers out there and even if you aren’t comfortable with the genre, then trust me it wasn’t my genre too until I read this one! I’m sure this particular narrative shall not disappoint you in any way!

The book is placed in a war-torn France and Germany during the third Reich. Its a story of a blind girl Marie-Laure LeBlanc who lives in Paris. Her Papa is a locksmith in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Though constantly dealing with her physical handicap she grows up in a loving family. To make is easier for his daughter to navigate the streets of Paris Marie’s father creates a small model of the city which allows Marie-Laure to feel her way into the city. This family of two has to move to the coastal city of Saint-Malo to Marie’s great-uncle’s house to flee a German occupied Paris. But, the war eventually reaches them in the quiet, sleepy city.On the other hand is an orphan boy in Germany called Werner who has a way with radios. He lives in the Children’s home with his sister Jutta until an officer recognizes this prodigy and opens the door of the elite military school for him. The raciological exams where Werner’s eye colour is gauged “against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed” and hair colour assessed using “thirty or so other locks clipped to a board” only amplifies the peculiar ways in which the Nazi Germany functioned. From this school he is sent to the frontlines to weed out the radio transmissions of the Allies.In this melee is a treasure hunt for the Sea of Flame, a precious stone which is widely believed to harbor the curse which although protects the beholder but brings misfortune upon everyone the beholder loves. Marie-Laure prays that her “Papa hasn’t been anywhere near it” when infact her father is one of the three men charged with protecting this stone.The story opens in 1944 in Saint-Malo where Marie-Laure is hiding in her house in the face of Allied bombings while Werner is trapped in the ruins of the Bees Hotel. Though most of the story takes place during WWII, the narrative still goes a lot back and forth. The stories seem unconnected on the surface but a fragile thread always wounds it all together. One such connection is a radio transmission that Werner and his sister used to listen to as kids and this broadcast was done by none other than Marie-Laure’s grandfather. The story always seems on course for the collision of the paths of these two individuals.The entire book is spent in expectation of the meeting of the protagonists and the result of this meeting. Like most other books about WWII this book is loaded with suspense, dread and horror in equal proportions. To make it easier for the reader Doerr makes the chapters very short (some chapters are less than a page long) while keeping the number of characters to a minimum. It provides a picture of the war from both sides, both Axis and Allied and the horrors of the war as experienced by the innocent French as well as the Germans. The decades after the war and the specter of war that hangs over the survivors is yet another one of the gems the book touches upon.This book doesn't have the reality of Anne Frank’s diary but has the dreamlike expectation of young love, it neither has the innocently ethereal beauty of The Book Thief but a severely intricate plot. In a world full of WWII narratives, this book certainly holds its own. The book is tragic yet it gives you hope and the story is indeed about all the light we cannot see in the darkness which we believe engulfs us.A must read, entirely absorbing and absolutely un-putdownable.