All The Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr - 530 Pages
15) A Pulitzer-Prize winning book

I've now had quite a while to mull over my thoughts for this book and my love has not lessened.
When I was nearing the climax I was literally unable to turn the pages fast enough. I'm pretty sure it's a miracle I didn't completely tear out some of the pages I was trying to flip faster. The Pulitzer-Prize was very well deserved and this is one of the best books I've ever read.
The book tells the story about two young people who grow up during the second World War. One is a Marie-Laure, a blind french girl with a loving father who makes a miniature of their neighborhood so that she can navigate Paris. The other is Werner, a german orphan who is incredibly bright but because of his social status will seemingly die in the mines like his father. Anthony Doerr intertwines their stories perfectly and shows us just what it may have been like to grow up in such a time. All The Light We Cannot See is not completely a reference to Marie-Laure being blind, it's also about the literal light our brain cannot see. But it's also about all the stories and lives we cannot possibly know. It's about how others touch our lives is such significant ways but we will never know. It's about all the goodness that seems a miracle but has some meaning we cannot understand.
My love for WWII Historical Fiction was enough to make me want to read this book and the writing style was more than enough to hook me for the whole 530 pages. The chapters are short so it felt like I flew through this book in four days.
I don't know guys, sometimes a book is just so beautiful that I'm left speachless. That's why I put off writing this review, in hopes that some coherent thoughts and meditations would manifest themselves. All The Light We Cannot See is that book.
At risk of sounding juvenile I want to point out something. There are a lot of young adult books now a days that center on a group of people being oppressed because they are slightly different. I've read a lot this year already. I think we have a tendency to say, "That could never happen in our world. We would never make slaves out of people with red blood if we had silver or gold (Red Queen and Golden Son) THIS IS NOT A FANTASY. This happened, this STILL happens.

"Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor."
His eyes fix on Werner's for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. "Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentleman. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even sown to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked on."
Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases.
(Page 240)

The Book Thief has been my favorite book for years and years now, but I think All The Light We Cannot See may be my new favorite book. Well done Mr. Doerr, well done.

"Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?"
"We might."
"What if you're blind?"
"I'd expect that if God wants us to see something, we'll see it."
(Page 292)

Read on,

Jamie