All the Light We Cannot See: The Breathtaking World Wide Bestseller

Unputdownable, Page-turner, Intriguing
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!

An absolute must-read
The language in the book is perhaps one of the most important bits, it is written with such rich and lively details that at times, I could almost see myself in places where Marie-Laure was or where Werner was. That was one of the most brilliant things about the book. There are many more. I think the fact that the author could transport me to that time period, make me as tense as Marie-Laure or Werner just makes me so happy?Is happy a word to be used when talking about this book, this time period? Maybe not but the author did make me very happy. It’s very important to me that I feel connected to the characters and transported to places in the books and it did that and more.The book jumps from time periods of Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s life, from their teen years to their younger years and back and forth. Sometimes it was a bit confusing to keep track of it, sometimes because it was an e-book, it was even frustrating to not be able to flip back to the pages I lost my thread. (An actual paperback really helps with this, it just gives me satisfaction if nothing else.)Everything about the book made me fall in love with it. There are the usual World War II horrors and you can’t escape them, most times, I was so acutely uncomfortable with the scene but I moved ahead anyway. This book is an absolute must-read if you like reading about the World War II. Not because it’s super informative or because there’s tons of other things that could make you relate to the people of the times more. It’s more to understand how it felt for the children, for those who grew up in Germany and had to join Hitler’s army. For the children who had nobody left, those who couldn’t do much for themselves. Marie-Laure and Werner might be fictional but there were real people who were in their places at some point. They must have faced countless problems and horrors.It is that feeling that makes me think that people should really read it.I have a lot of wonderful things to say about it and I could say it but there’s also the one bit that I felt almost unnecessary in the book. Yes, the hunt for the Sea of Flames. The diamond. That part always felt unnecessary and almost tacked on as if it was an afterthought. I am not saying I didn’t enjoy the fantasy of it and there was a realistic part to it but at the same time, it just didn’t click with the rest of the book.However that does not negate all the awesome things about this book and so, this remains a five-star book.I would recommend it to anyone who loves to read World War II fiction or who wants to see how language can be elevated to this level. If you wanna read in leisure, you totally can!! This book, despite it being based during the World War II, has an almost unhurried pace to it. It’s just me who wouldn’t stop reading.And if you still have any doubts about this book, it’s worth mentioning that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015. So, there’s that?

Um dos melhores livros que li na vida. Poético, lindo, devastador. Vale muito a leitura.

A beautiful story with wonderfully fleshed-out characters. Marie is a delight to get to know and watch her grow through challenge after challenge, not only to survive, but to become a balanced and mature person with an optimistic view of such a harsh world, finding the joy and ‘light’ in it.Reading Werner is a masterclass in character depth and understanding motivations. We follow him through his personal growth in an atmosphere entrenched in propaganda, trying not to lose himself, and how being anchored to his sister helped shape his personality.The story takes place in a small town during one of the most horrific periods of human history. It challenges the reader to see people as individuals, not lumping them into groups or classifications. I found it thought-provoking and inspiring.