Posted on April 30, 2018
All The Light We Cannot See: Book Review
For this unit we are learning about WWII. Everyone in the class had to pick a book to read that is based during WWII. This helped us to learn how different countries viewed WWII as each book showed different perspectives of the war. There were three options to choose from: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Weins, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, and All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I chose All The Light We Cannot See because I liked the idea of reading a book from two different people’s perspectives. Throughout reading the book we often had in class discussions and quizzes. Once everyone was done their book, we all had to write a book review. As a class we read a few examples and learned the important aspects of a book review, then we were ready to write. Here is my book review. Enjoy!
This historical fiction novel is a great thing to read if you have a long plane ride or a lot of spare time. It is a page turner and you will not want to put it down. The storytelling style is consuming and a very unique way to tell such a complex, intense story. It is brimming with details that fill all 5 senses. Set in Germany and France during WWII. This novel tells the stories of two kid’s struggles while trying to survive the war, and how their stories cross paths. It is written in the third person perspective and switches between observing each child’s life every chapter. Similar to one of Anthony Doerrs other books, The Shell Collector, one of the main characters is blind.
Marie-Laure is a little, blind French girl with brown hair and freckles. Marie-Laure is six years old when the novel begins, in Paris, 1934. She lives with her Papa, a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. At the museum there is a one of a kind stone, The Sea of Flames. “It’s cold. The size of a pigeon’s egg. The shape of a teardrop.” The stone is supposedly cursed and whoever has the stone will live forever, but bad things will happen to everyone they love. The stone ends up in Marie-Laure’s care and she has to keep it safe so she can break the curse. Marie-Laure’s story was my favourite to follow because she had to face so many challenges and it always kept me on my toes.
Werner is a German orphan who lives with his sister, Jutta, in an orphanage located in the German mining town of Zollverein. Werner is 7 when the story starts. He is a tiny boy who has a thirst for knowledge and is extremely intelligent. In this book the stereotype of a mean caretaker is broken, the caretaker of the orphans is an extremely nice lady named Frau Elena. Werner starts off the story being afraid of becoming a miner when he turns 16, because his father died in the mines. He is willing to do anything to stay out of the mines, including join the war. Reading the story about a German soldier was very interesting. Seeing that point of view is very rare and it was cool to see how a German might have felt about the war.
Anthony Doerr is clearly a very thoughtful author. Writing about a blind girl must be challenging because you would have to be very descriptive, and creative to be to show how she views life. He did a very good job at this but sometimes he did too good of a job. There were some times where he would describe pointless details way more thoroughly than needed. For example when Marie is walking Doerr often described what was happening is great detail which got tiring because Marie walked a lot and it often wasn’t necessary to the story. On the other hand, there were some parts of the story that I would have preferred to have gone into more detail. Doerr often left me asking questions after significant events happened. For example Marie-Laure practically went blind in a sentence-“One month later she is blind.” The more significant parts needed to be more descriptive.
The first 100 pages of the book are a little hard to get through because of short sentences and lack of an exciting plot, but once you get through those, the book is exhilarating. It has so many different aspects that there is bound to be some part of the story that everyone would love. Doerr was very creative and made some risky choices involving perspectives that ultimately paid off. Even though just telling one of the children’s stories would have been good, telling both of them showed both sides of the war and how they connected. This book had some boring parts part the positives outweighed the negatives. I ultimately enjoyed the book but not as much as I was expecting too. It showed many aspects of the war in an honest and accurate way. Doerr told an amazing story and it deserves all of the awards it has received.
Anthony Doerr
The post is well put together and clearly explains what we have been doing and what the task was we had to complete. All of the book titles are italicized and the photos of the book cover and author add to the book reveiw and the paragraph before. The only thing I would change would be to add a little bit more information in the first couple of sentences. For example, why we had to read a book and how it helped or did not help with the rest of the things we have learned in the unit.