A Girl and A Boy

Time for my beach read, and this year it is All The Light We Cannot See. It's a story about a girl and a boy. In August of 1944, in the waning days of World War II, the picturesque Breton town of Saint-Malo, occupied by the retreating German army, is being bombed by Allied forces. Alone on the top floor of a tall narrow house, a French sixteen-year-old blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc fears for her life. Five blocks away eighteen-year-old German private Werner Pfennig, a radio specialist stationed in a grand old hotel, is assigned to intercept messages from Allied sympathizers and eliminate them. The two have never met.

Having set them so close together, author Anthony Doerr then jumps backward to 1934, to tell the parallel stories of their childhoods. Hers is the tale of a comfortable life in pre-war Paris near the Jardin des Plantes, with a loving father who teaches his daughter that her blindness is no handicap. His is the harsher existence of an orphan in a coal mining region outside Essen, but he is saved from a life in the mines or on the front lines by his extraordinary talent with radios. In brief chapters, Doerr cuts back and forth between Saint-Malo of 1944 and the paths each took from the start of the war to their current precarious state.

I know, I know. Blind girl, orphan boy, war, danger, love conquers all, sentimental and predictable. Not at all. This beautifully written book is many things – suspenseful, emotional, nuanced, heartbreaking, joyous – but it is resoundingly unsentimental. Yes there are a few coincidences, but none that disturb the flow of this haunting story. An added plus – short chapters! Beach, plane trip, waiting room, DMV line – this book is the perfect choice.