Book: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony DoerrGenre: Historical Fiction
Rating:★★★★☆
Wow. I read a book! And a big adult type one at that! And guess what? I liked it. I really really liked it!
So yeah, there's been a ton of buzz about this one. I'm glad to have finally managed to read it myself. Thank you book club!
It's about two kids during WWII. One is a blind French girl who gets displaced during the German occupation and ends up living in a village outside of Paris for the duration of the war with her great uncle who has PTSD from the first world war. She adapts to things very well and is living a fairly nice life, helping her uncle come out again and learning all about his radio hobby.
The other kid is a German boy who is extremely smart and gets recruited to work in the war as the guy who seeks out people doing illegal radio transmission. Yeah. Do you see the connection here?
Well, after much much time, their stories converse for a brief moment. But before that happens, we get completely invested in BOTH of them. Who cares that they are opposite sides of the war!? I truly love stories that can do this... make you realize that there are just people involved doing what they have to do to survive and that there is no good guys or bad guys. I mean, there are, but the people are just the people, know what I mean?
Anyway. There's also a bit of a strange element of the supernatural in this story... but it didn't really bother me that much. Some at book club could have done without it though. What made me crazy was I was DYING for their stories to converge and when they finally did, it was for such a short period of time. Ah. I wanted more there!!! I wanted a nice little romantic happy ending.
But, you know, you can't have it all I guess.
Still, I really enjoyed this book. The storytelling was awesome. The writing was beautiful. The characters were fascinating. And it held my wandering and unfocused attention unlike any book has done for a long time.
I keep meaning to get around to this. I have heard good things about it.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad this one held your attention. It was riveting. I wished I had liked it better.
ReplyDeleteThis book may haunt me for some time. I can't express enough how beautifully written the pages are. I highly recommend this read as it is my favorite so far for 2014.
ReplyDeletePenelope
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I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'll have to read it when my slump isn't as bad as it is. :)
ReplyDeleteI loved this book so much! Congrats on reading a big, adult book!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you enjoyed this so much, especially since it's not your usual genre. Like you, I enjoyed this and thought the writing was particularly beautiful, but I wanted more from the ending.
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