All the Light We Cannot See

Magic. Pure magic.

This book...I'm almost at a loss for words! If you haven't yet read All the Light We Cannot See, it's imperative that you put it on your TBR list this instant.

Anthony Doerr's brilliant and captivating style of writing and story-telling blew me away. I was enthralled with the story and the characters from the moment I started reading, and couldn't put this book down!

The story is a World War II story, but it's so much more than that. It's so deeply human...cares, loves, curiosities, passions, yearnings, growing up. All of this is weaved into the parallel stories of two main characters, Marie-Laure and Werner. One French, one German, both swept up in opposite sides of the war in life-altering ways. Both children, both forced to grow up before they should have. The stories start in parallel, and then you get these expertly crafted wisps of the stories being somehow connected, and you watch as they slowly inch their way toward intersecting.

The way Doerr uses light throughout the book captivated me. It's the visible light that Marie-Laure can only see inside her brain due to her blindness, the creative spark of light inside the minds of children, the way a character near the end turns on all her lights to look as if she's expecting someone, rather then being lonely – all of this and so many more uses of light were just brilliant. If I was still in college and writing a paper on this book, I would have gone all sorts of crazy with post-its and underlining, and it would have been awesome.

Read the rest of this review here: http://www.literaryquicksand.com/2016/02/review-all-the-light-we-cannot-see-by-anthony-doerr/