Book Review "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

This is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. When I say beautifully written, I am mainly focusing on the detail of the language. Every writer has a different style and a different writing process, but Doerr's attention to word choice in creating beautiful images is meticulous. For anyone who has gone through a writing workshop I will say it like this: Doerr took the scalpel to his writing and pared down the language for a clean and crisp delivery of description and metaphor like in poetry. It took Doerr ten years to write this book, and I felt that time and deliberation in every chosen word.

This type of literary lyricism isn't for every reader and neither is the cutting back in forth through time in the narrative. The third person present tense allows this kind of movement through time, but if a reader isn't paying close attention they may be thrown by unidentified shifts in the story's timeline.

The narrative is primarily told from the limited perspectives of two characters that are only children as WWII encroaches, and are teenagers when the war ends. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the blind daughter of the locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. If you are familiar with WWII history, or perhaps The Monuments Men, then you may have heard that upon the Nazi invasion of France all of the precious works of art that define human culture throughout time were hunted down for inclusion in Hitler's own Fuhrermuseum that would be the pinnacle of all culture as he saw it. However, the French knew the German's were coming and they took certain precautions. Marie-Laure's father is part of the Museum of Natural History's contingency plan. So, upon the occupation of Paris, he and Marie-Laure flee the city and wind up with his WWI shell-shocked Uncle Etienne in the coastal town of Saint-Malo carrying something precious with them.