All the Light We Cannot See: Summary & Analysis - Softcover

Doerr, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944195939 ISBN 13: 9781944195939

Publisher: Lightning Source Inc, 2016

Synopsis

NOTE: This title is summary and analysis only and NOT the actual book
The lives of two teens, a French girl and a German boy, improbably intersect at the end of World War II in All The Light We Cannot See. Before the war, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who has been blind since childhood, lives comfortably in Paris with her father, Daniel, who is the key master for the natural history museum. She loves to visit the museum and learn, especially about molluscs, or snails. Her father makes her a detailed wooden replica of their neighborhood so she can learn to navigate it. He also makes complicated wooden puzzle boxes that delight her. He gives her a Braille copy of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and then, after she devours it, the first volume of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Marie-Laure is also fascinated by a story she hears at the museum of a fabulous diamond hidden there, called the...

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Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Does the world need yet another novel about WWII? It does when the novel is as inventive and beautiful as this one by Anthony Doerr. In fact, All the Light We Cannot See--while set mostly in Germany and France before and during the war--is not really a “war novel”. Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author’s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Marie Laure is a blind 14-year-old French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills admit him to a brutal branch of Hitler Youth. Never mind that their paths don’t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). This is a book you read for the beauty of Doerr’s writing-- “Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat, Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food…”--and for the way he understands and cherishes the magical obsessions of childhood. Marie Laure and Werner are never quaint or twee. Instead they are powerful examples of the way average people in trying times must decide daily between morality and survival. --Sara Nelson

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About this edition

• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1944195939
• ISBN 13: 9781944195939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32