All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr (Casual Review)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This book took me back to the fifth and sixth grade days of earnest, sentimental and honestly pretty beautiful YA novels like The Book Thief, The Bridge to Terabithia, Holes, and all those great classics. This is one of the only adult books I've read with the same feeling of being in a bright, high-stakes, emotional world where people go on adventures and have earned genuine sentimental moments. This book is a tough sell because the idea of kids who love science and live during WWII sounds like the premise of a cliche sentimental movie where innocence of children redeems the world. It's hard to convince people this book is emotional, but it's not gimmicky or overdramatic (it's a lot like an adult version of The Book Thief).
Similarly to a lot of the classic books I mention above, the characters here are defined by a few key interests and passions: Werner, a German boy, repairs radios and teaches himself about science and math, Maure Laure, a blind French girl, loves Jules Verne and the ocean. Anthony Doerr understands and never romanticizes childhood obsession: I never felt like condescending adult admiring a child's passions for science or oceanography, I felt like a person with an eshausive knowledge of Jules Verne and radios experiencing everything through the lens of Jules Verne and radios.
The book begins with Werner applying and getting accepted to an ultra-competitive Hitler Youth school. Like you would expect, Werner encounters prejudice and hate, but Werner never becomes an innocent bystander who suddenly realizes Nazism is bad. Werner never has the distance or perspective to think objectively about whether Nazism is right or wrong. Instead he slowly becomes more depressed, more scared of everything, and more desensitized to violence. He eventually stops feeling much of anything except paranoia. It's a really scary account of what happens in a tyrannical or abusive place.
I had a few gripes with this book – there are too many epilogues that tell us what happens to every minor character, and the character of the French girl, while being incredibly likable, real and occasionally badass, does not change significantly over the course of the book. There's also one side character who's a 13 year old with the self-awareness of a 30 year old. But in general, this book is an intelligent page turner with 2-5 page chapters bouyed by vivid, beautiful prose and characters that I wanted to keep spending time with.
Similarly to a lot of the classic books I mention above, the characters here are defined by a few key interests and passions: Werner, a German boy, repairs radios and teaches himself about science and math, Maure Laure, a blind French girl, loves Jules Verne and the ocean. Anthony Doerr understands and never romanticizes childhood obsession: I never felt like condescending adult admiring a child's passions for science or oceanography, I felt like a person with an eshausive knowledge of Jules Verne and radios experiencing everything through the lens of Jules Verne and radios.
The book begins with Werner applying and getting accepted to an ultra-competitive Hitler Youth school. Like you would expect, Werner encounters prejudice and hate, but Werner never becomes an innocent bystander who suddenly realizes Nazism is bad. Werner never has the distance or perspective to think objectively about whether Nazism is right or wrong. Instead he slowly becomes more depressed, more scared of everything, and more desensitized to violence. He eventually stops feeling much of anything except paranoia. It's a really scary account of what happens in a tyrannical or abusive place.
I had a few gripes with this book – there are too many epilogues that tell us what happens to every minor character, and the character of the French girl, while being incredibly likable, real and occasionally badass, does not change significantly over the course of the book. There's also one side character who's a 13 year old with the self-awareness of a 30 year old. But in general, this book is an intelligent page turner with 2-5 page chapters bouyed by vivid, beautiful prose and characters that I wanted to keep spending time with.