A Birthday Book!

My parents were in town this past weekend for my birthday and they offered to buy me a book from the bookstore. I picked out All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Anthony Doerr. It looked intriguing to me and it was because I made it through the 530-page book in about 2 days.

Doerr writes the two tales of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and a German boy, Werner. For the majority of the book, you read of their separate experiences on either side of WWII. Marie-Laure, despite her blindness, lives a charmed life with her father who is the master of thousands of locks at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He creates perfect miniature models of all the buildings in their neighborhood so Marie-Laure can find her way home. Werner is an orphan but possesses great talent with radios and mathematics that ends up making him an asset to Hitler's Youth. The war ends up bringing them together in the city of Saint-Malo.

The intertwined stories create a lot of mystery and suspense. As we are led through the course of the war, we understand more about the immense difficulties that people on both sides of the war endured. I found myself emotionally invested in the characters and wanted them to succeed in their adventures. The war changed a lot of things for them and being a youth during that time would be difficult.

I love historical fiction! So this book was right up my alley. Anthony Doerr is very vivid in his language and descriptions of the buildings, landscape, and people. This is only his second novel but I'd definitely read other things by the same author. If you're a fan of historical fiction, check out this book!