REVIEW: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
- Alice Rickless
- Dec 25, 2021
- 3 min read
A Short review of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Since the age of 12 I have been very wary of reading books about World War II. As an avid reader, my teachers were fast to recommend books to me, and some, when they discovered I was Jewish, would recommend novels about the Holocaust. I think that this was their way of trying to connect with me on a special level different from that of other kids, but after my fourth book about the friendship between Jewish children befriending German children with a happy ending I became sick and tired of reading dark but uplifting books about the war. I began to see that some authors used the topic as part of a fad, like how after the popularity of The Fault in Our Stars practically every book in the YA section had a protagonist with a shortened life-span. Since then, I have not read many books that even mention World War II on the cover, and tend not to buy them if I can help it.
A few months ago I saw this book everywhere on my social media. I was on a side of TikTok called ‘BookTok’ which was full of videos from other avid readers on their favorite books. After seeing All The Light We Cannot See in many videos, the one that made me buy it was titled “Books that made me love to read again”. I’ve found that many teens tend to lose their love for reading around the age of 13 or so, mostly when they’ve been made to read specific books for classes that they don’t necessarily enjoy. There is a phenomenon, though, which I have seen with people I know, where they pick up a book for the first time in years, and that reopens the floodgates of their childhood when they couldn’t stop reading. Finding a book like that is not easy, and when I read that this book had sparked that for someone, I figured it would be worth it to add to my Goodreads.
I bought it a few weeks ago in my favorite local bookshop when I was having a bad day but only sat down to begin it a few days ago. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr centers around two different but connected stories. One is of a German boy, Werner, an orphan who is destined to work in the mines but dreams of becoming a scientist and has talent that catches the eye of the Hitler Youth. And one is of a blind girl from Paris, Marie- Laure whose father works for the Museum of Nature History and who creates miniature neighborhoods for his daughter to teach her how to always come home. These two stories are deeply interconnected, in ways unexpected from the first moment of the book.
All the Light We Cannot See, while set during World War II, is not about the war as much as it is about people. Every spare moment I had over the span of three days I spent reading this book. When I was not reading it I was wondering where Werner and Marie-Laure were in the story and where they were going to be when it ended. I didn’t feel overly disturbed by the content; Doerr did nothing for shock value like many of the other WWII books I have read. Breaking the promise I made to myself as a preteen, I could not recommend this novel more. Make sure that you give yourself the time to read it in only a few sittings as it is so hard to put down.
5 STARS
Where to buy online:
Support your local bookshop and go in and buy it there if you can!
Comments