Forced to rediscover the streets of her hometown, her father painstakingly and patiently fills the void in her life left by her mother’s death and her lost sight. Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, the daughter of the Keeper of the Keys at a French museum, is half-orphaned and struck blind in childhood. His life is to be nasty, brutish, and short, and even when chance provides him an opportunity to escape and pursue his dreams of scientific inquiry, it is only at the hands of the thuggish Nazis, as concerned with his hair and eye color as his natural genius as long as it serves the war’s purpose. Werner is the rare genius orphan destined for the mines that fuel and arm the Wehrmacht in its march across Europe and into the Soviet Union. From the beginning, the lives of Doerr’s protagonists are heavily laced with the tragic. But I digress.)Īll the Light We Cannot See is largely set during the years just before and then during World War II. There’s a reason my first response to an impassioned and tear-stained story from one of my girls is “so, go take care of it like this…” followed by more tears… “Oh, you want empathy? Okay, let me see if I remember how to do that…” I just don’t default to an empathetic response, though maybe that would make me a better person. (And let’s be honest, there are times I have the emotional range of a teaspoon. Almost from the beginning, it was obvious to me that no one was coming out of this story unscarred–if at all–and the tragedy permeated every page. Rather it’s the emotional demands that Anthony Doerr’s historical novel, set in parts of Germany and France during World War II, that was difficult for me. There are novels that are difficult to read because they demand more fo the reader ( Turn of the Screw comes to mind, but I think it’s mostly just dry… Crime and Punishment is probably closer to what I mean), but it isn’t a level of technical difficulty that I am talking about.

That said, I feel like it was also one of the most effortlessly painful books I’ve read in a while. It’s easily one of the most moving books I’ve read in recent memory.

I think I must be the last person I know to read All the Light We Cannot See, and I admit I’m kicking myself that I took so long.

All the light you cannot see book