All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr belongs on the must-read shelf for many readers and it now is on my Favorites shelf.   It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015 and has won other awards and has received many fine reviews, deservedly so.

I started reading it without knowing anything about it, other than a couple of vague verbal recommendations.   As I read through the first part of the novel I found myself surprised by the characters, the plot line, and the overall design.

The novel is set in France and Germany from 1934 through World War Two.   The main characters are a young blind French girl (Marie-Laure LeBlanc) and a young German boy (Werner Pfennig).   We learn about the rise of Nazism, the workings of the study of Natural History,  the German occupation of France, and the siege of Saint-Malo, all filtered through the eyes of Werner and Marie-Laure.

The limited perspective narrative of Marie-Laure’s life is the core of the novel, the best part of the novel.   There are a number of sub-plots – Werner’s boarding school, his radio skills, his military experiences, the fashioning of the models for Marie-Laure, the radio broadcasts of stories, the mystery of the jewel, life in Saint-Malo, and the secondary characters of the story – all add to the richness of the storytelling.

Near the end of the story, Marie-Laure and Werner’s lives intersect and I found myself surprised by the events.   The author could have fallen into cliches, but kept the telling fresh and imaginative, avoiding a predictable outcome.    The author understated the themes throughout, for which I was grateful.    The reader has to develop his/her own understandings and the final chapter is ambiguous, allowing us to reflect and come to our own conclusions.

She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. “Goodbye, Werner.”
“Goodbye, Marie-Laure.”
Then she goes. Every few paces, the tip of her cane strikes a broken stone in the street, and it takes a while to pick her way around it. Step step pause. Step step again. Her cane testing, the wet hem of her dress swinging, the white pillowcase held aloft. He does not look away until she is through the intersection, down the next block, and out of sight.