All the Light We Cannot See

In my mind, this is already a classic.

I resisted reading All The Light We Cannot See when it was published in May, thinking the world did not really need another novel about the Second World War. Well, I was wrong. It is quite a vocabulary challenge to find the adjectives to describe this marvelous book without falling into cliché. Anthony Doerr’s wordsmithery is superb, his storyline development masterful, and the characters described so vividly that it is absolutely inconceivable that a reader could resist engaging in their lives. The main protagonists are a German orphan boy and a blind young French girl. I assure you there is no schmaltz in this story, which was what I feared when I read some of the blurbs. This is not a book to be read quickly, but one the reader will want to savor, soaking in all the luscious details of the plot evolution. Werner Pfennig and his younger sister Jutta live in a Children’s House with about a dozen other children of various ages in a small German mining town of Zollverein. Frau Elena is their loving caregiver who also teaches them French. It is 1934 and curious, clever Werner peppers Frau Elena with questions, and with his sister Jutta scours the junk piles in search of “stuff” from which he makes things. One day he finds an old radio and figures out to repair it, which opens a new world to the Children’s House. For one hour an evening, they listen together to music and programs on the radio, after which Werner takes it back up to his sleeping area. When unable to sleep one night, Werner finds a broadcast by a French man teaching science to children and playing classical music. Werner and Jutta listen faithfully for weeks until no longer able to receive his signal. This “French professor” and his broadcasts will turn out to be a link to a young blind Parisian girl living about 300 miles from Zollverein. Marie-Laure LeBlanc lives in Paris with her father Daniel, the chief locksmith at the National Museum of Natural History, just a few blocks from their apartment. Ma...