5-600 books
Summary :
The story revolves around a six year old blind girl named, Marie-Laure who lives with his father
lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Revieeew :
he real beauty in this book comes from Doerr’s way with words, his description of things, his flair for originality and aesthetics, and his ridiculous research/understanding of history. Also, his keen observation of human life, but, maybe more importantly, the physical world. Also, the way he plays with magic realism: a flirtation. (He’s just playing with words, see?) All the senses feel this book all the way through. Every moment is thoughtful, every sentence rings with both clarity and beauty. Can we be made to sympathize with a Nazi? He doesn’t start out as a Nazi. Maybe he doesn’t want to even be a Nazi. (This brings up plenty of feelings about Russian soldiers, at this point in history.) Will the story become a romance? (First, you have to figure out how old these characters actually are. Sometimes Doerr gets so good at being creative and fancy that the obvious things get lost. By the “end,” Marie-Laure is 16 and Werner is 18. I think.)
supporting characters and (there, underneath) traditional plot line (like bad guy, magical relic, etc.).
old mostly in the present tense, in short and usually pointed chapters, the story moves briskly and efficiently toward its climactic encounter during the Allied bombing of St.-Malo, France, a couple of months after D-Day. Although the narrative consists largely of flashbacks, it’s easy to follow because it focuses most sharply on only two characters, the blind child Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who takes part in the French Resistance, and the very Aryan-looking Werner Pfennig, a technocratic private in the service of the Thousand-Year Reich.Marie-Laure is an exquisitely realized creation. Her blindness is convincingly represented, and the steady love of her locksmith father (who builds scale models of the neighborhoods she must learn to negotiate with her cane) makes her story both more beautiful and more believable
ntirely absorbing: one of those books in which the talent of the storyteller surmounts stylistic inadequacies and ultimately defies one’s better judgment.
All the Light We Cannot See is a #1 New York Times Bestseller, a book that I see prominent in every single bookstore I go in to, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And other awards and other awards. Published in 2014, it is about, essentially, two teenagers, one a boy and one a girl. The girl is a blind Parisian who is hiding in her great-uncle’s house on the coast of France during the German siege of Saint-Malo during World War II. The boy is a German orphan with a remarkable aptitude for machines (specifically radio transmitters) which the Nazis exploit in a troubled, conflicted journey through the Nazi youth into the army. He is in Saint-Malo for the siege, as well. Some of the content of the book takes place in both of their childhoods and some takes place after their meeting (even far into the future), but most of it is from the invasion of Paris up to the siege. It’s a serious book, a heavy book, a thoughtful book, a haunting book. It’s a book about war: it has some real tough moments.
