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Summary:

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors� (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill� (Los Angeles Times).

As Yvonne was having trouble setting up the discussion I have posted her questions below.

Hello all, hope you all enjoyed the book!

1. The narration moves back and forth both in time and characters, how did this affect your reading experience? How do you think the experience would have been if those story had been written in a chronological order?
2. Which story did you enjoy the most? Did you have a favorite character?
3. On page 390, the author writes, "To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness." What did you learn about blindness through Marie-Laure's perspective? Do you think her blindness gave her any adavantages?
4. Why do you think Marie-Laure gave Werner the little iron key? Why might Werner have gone back for the woodern house and not the Sea of Flames?
5. Von Rompel seemed to believe in the power of the Sea of Flames, do you think it was really a supernatural object or was it simply a gemstone? Do you think it brought protection to Marie--Laure and/or bad luck to those she loved?

The narration moves back and forth both in time and characters, how did this affect your reading experience? How do you think the experience would have been if those story had been written in a chronological order?

I didn't have a problem with the narration going back & forth between the characters. I had more trouble with how the dates/years were presented. There were times when I asked myself, "this happened first?"
That's the only issue I had with the book. It was seamless, otherwise.

Which story did you enjoy the most? Did you have a favorite character?
I love the book, but I have an especially soft spot for Light. It depicts Marie-Laure's struggles and her eventual victory over her blindness.
I have nothing but love for both Werner and Marie-Laure, but my favorites were Frederick and Daniel LeBlanc.
Frederick seemed odd, especially with his fixation on birds, but he's different in a good way. He stayed human in a society where identities were stripped away.
I fell in love with Daniel LeBlanc's dedication and love for his daughter. He laboriously created a miniature replica of Saint Malo.