Just Finished Reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is an American writer whose 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See was a big award-winning hit.  It is set mainly in France and Germany during World War II and the years just preceding it.  A French girl, Marie-Laure, develops cataracts early in childhood and is blind for life...she lives in Paris with her father, a locksmith working for the Museum of Natural History.  There is a mysterious diamond stone there, the Sea of Flames, that purports to guarantee immortality to whoever possesses it while cursing those around them.  Meanwhile, in Germany lives young Werner, a boy gifted about electronics and tinkering who, with his younger sister Jutta, grows up under the oppressive and racist rule of Hitler's Nazi regime as it militarizes and prepares for war.  He is sent to a boy's academy while Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris to coastal Saint-Malo (where her great-uncle Etienne lives) when the French capital city is occupied by the Germans in the spring of 1940.  The story goes down three paths: one, Marie-Laure's story, two, that of Werner as he eventually finds himself drawn into the war as a technician, and three, the fate of that valuable Sea of Flames as a terminally ill Nazi officer is hell-bent on finding it for himself.  I guess that's about as much as I feel comfortable saying about what happens in the book...no need to be a plot spoiler...

This is another novel exposing the horrendous conditions civilians and soldiers alike experienced in Europe during World War II.  In Hitler's totalitarian Nazi society young Werner has to choose between his own survival and compromising his values, just one example of millions of Germans forced to bear the shame of the Nazi atrocities.  Marie-Laure's father had constructed for her exact scale-model replicas of both their neighborhoods in Paris and Saint-Malo...she uses them as an aid to get around as well as understanding her environment.  I loved how she treasures her braille books, especially Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Werner and Jutta's forbidden shortwave radio listening brought back memories of when I was a kid and would listen to my own radio late at night for distant AM stations.  I thought All the Light We Cannot See was well-written and gave an empathetic, compassionate treatment of some people just struggling to endure this terrible war, both from the viewpoints of the occupied and the occupier...