All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer in 2015, making it a perfect choice to round out my month of award-winning reads. I had heard good things about this novel in a general sense before reading, but I didn't quite know what it was about when I picked it up. The inside flap of the book wasn't overly illuminating either, so I went into my reading not knowing what to expect. Obviously, you expect a book that won the Pulitzer to be awesome, but my experience with this novel went far beyond that. I was utterly floored by the brilliance of this one.

The plot of this novel focuses on the experiences of two children growing up during WWII. The first child, Marie, is a young French girl who becomes blind at the age of six. She lives with her father, who is in charge of the thousands of locks and keys at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. When Marie's vision first fails, her father builds her a perfect wooden model of their section of Paris, with all of its streets, buildings, benches and storm drains included. Patiently, he teaches her how to use the model to memorize her city and make her way around unaided. As Marie learns to live with her blindness and grows up a bit, her life is flung into chaos when Germany invades and occupies France. Suddenly, she has to leave the only home she's ever known and live with her uncle in Saint Malo, a walled city on the coast of France. Hunger, fear and uncertainty begin to color her days as she learns how to survive in a new city during wartime while blind.

The second child, Werner Pfennig, is a young German orphan. He lives in an orphanage, with his sister Jutta, in Zollverein, a town dominated by its coal mine. As the novel opens, his life is difficult. With Germany suffering under the reparations from WWI, there is never enough food to go around, and no money for basic necessities, like clothing, shoes, and blankets. However Werner is an unusually curious and scientifically-minded child. He discovers a talent for repairing radios, which catches the attention of a German military official who is stationed in the area. As Hitler rises to power, and WWII begins, Werner is selected to attend a special school for the Hitler Youth, to further develop his skill with radios and aid in the war effort. He is uncomfortable with the practices of the German military, but the possibility of becoming a scientist and avoiding a life of working in a coal mine keeps him following the party line.

The perspective of the novel jumps around very frequently, and alternates mainly between Marie and Werner's perspectives. Chapter length is kept extremely short, with most chapters being around 2-3 pages long. These frequent changes are effective at maintaining the momentum of the story. As both threads of the plot are equally interesting, I didn't mind the frequency of the shifts. The novel also jumps backwards and forwards in time, with some sections taking place in 1944, where the climax of the novel is occurring, and other sections taking place throughout the 1930s. Doerr handles these time changes absolutely masterfully. They increase the suspense of the novel perfectly, and help the reader make connections between the past and present timelines. While reading, one gets the sense that all of the story threads are slowly pulling you in towards a final great moment. When Marie and Werner's stories finally crash together, it is so incredibly satisfying, because the buildup was done so well.

Aside from the engaging plot construction, Doerr's language was similarly noteworthy. This sounds unnecessary to say about a writer, but Doerr really has a way with words. His sentences are filled with vivid imagery and have a rhythm that makes reading his work a real pleasure. It is no coincidence that Goodreads has 26 pages worth of quotes from this novel on their site. From describing a woman as being "like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees" to encouraging one to, "open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever," All the Light is packed with beautiful, musical prose that will stick in your head long after you finish reading. I often found myself pausing to reread sections of the novel, and I'm not generally one to do that a lot.

Interestingly enough, this novel formed a beautiful circle in my personal reading goals this year. When I first started out my months of theme reading for 2016, the very first book I read was Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have done a year's worth of reading between then and now, and finally arrived at All the Light We Cannot See, my last themed-read of the year. It is nothing short of poetry that one of the great joys of Marie's life is reading her braille books, and the one she reads over and over throughout the novel is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Each quote and reference this novel draws from Verne's classic brought back a lot of memories for me and reminded my about how much I've read throughout the year. In a way, I'm ending back at the beginning, and that's pretty cool. I couldn't have planned it any better.

All the Light We Cannot See is a very special novel, and one of my best reads of the year. This new favorite holds a place in my heart now and it was the perfect way to end my themed reads of 2016.