All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."
                                      -from the novel

I chose this book for January because it was highly recommended by one member of our group. Also it is over 500 pages and since we don't meet in December, there would be plenty of time for everyone to find a copy and read it between mid-November and January. As it turned out, it was not so easy for everyone to get a copy. Best-seller status had the waiting list at the library quite long.

I just realized we started last year off with The Book Thief, another European WWII historical fiction. I must admit I loved The Book Thief but this one, not so much. I will rate All the Light... a 4. The writing is amazing with vivid imagery, almost poetic in places. The characters are well-developed, for example, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the indomitable blind French girl, for whom any reader could feel compassion. And Werner Pfennig, the German orphan youth who gets sucked into the Nazi movement because of his extraordinary ability and finds he has no stomach for it. But then there is also relentless and cruel German officer Von Rumpel whom we could all love to hate!

The movement of the narration back and forth in time and between different characters was sometimes confusing, just enough to make it a more challenging read. And it took a while to get used to the author's prevalent sentence fragments . The plot was very interesting with the Sea of Flames, a very rare and perhaps cursed stone, a central object. The novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was mentioned a number of times in the story and I must confess I never read it so I missed its significance.

Our book club meets on Thursday to discuss the book. I will finish up this post with the results.
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We had 12 people attending our meeting, an excellent group with everyone, including a new member, providing great insight. The group gave the book an average rating of 4.4 with most votes being 4's and 5's. Everyone seemed to think the book was well-written with an intriguing plot. We agreed that the two main characters, Marie-Laure and Werner, were very likeable and several minor ones, as well. Some especially enjoyed the emergence of Etienne. We used the discussion questions issued by the publisher, which I found at the LitLovers website. The first question about the impact of the radio in the time period led to some interesting comments. In comparison, someone thought the radio had even more profound impact in that time than the Internet does today. Near the end of our time, one member wanted to discuss the significance of the title. We noted that there were several mentions of light in different contexts throughout the novel. One member thought it certainly had to do with Marie-Laure's blindness not preventing her from "seeing" the world even without physical vision. The "light" was in her highly developed mental ability, so to speak. "To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness," (p390) seems to relate.
A few of us agreed that though we might have been hoping for happily-ever-after, it would not have been realistic to the time or the story. Most of our members would recommend this one, I believe. I liked it even better after hearing the discussion!