All The Light We Cannot See By Anthony Doerr

I selected the novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr because in the summary the novel is said to tell the story of a blind girl and—having read once before a novel from the perspective of a blind girl—was intrigued to see the author’s take on it. The story begins in Saint Malo, France 1944 in the midst of WWII. It then bounces back 10 years to 1934 and with brief excerpts from the starting point tells the tale of how the narrators reached their predicaments. The two main narrators are Marie-Laure, a sixteen-year-old blind French girl, and Werner a sixteen-year-old German boy who excels with radios. There are also five other narrators that are not constant but provide context as to how main events occur. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in part due to his intricate woodworkings as he was able to create nearly unsolvable puzzle boxes and he created a model of both Paris and Saint Malo so that Marie-Laure would know her way around.

When Paris became dangerous the director of the museum gave Marie-Laure’s father the diamond and he hid it inside the model of Saint Malo before he was arrested in 1941. The diamond is how Marie-Laure at the beginning of the novel survives the bombing while on the sixth floor of her uncle’s