Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - All the Light We Cannot See

I liked the prose in this book, but man was it a long read (or listen, it’s a 15 hour long audiobook, and I had to wait for it to become available again though my library). I can’t justify giving this a 5 star rating due to some decisions on how to portray the war. It’s a little too… baby-proofed? It reads like it was intended to be included in a middle school English class, but this book is long.

I enjoyed the plot progression, and the jumping around in timelines was never confusing for me. The writing was lovely, but it was also drawn out enough that I could leave my phone blaring the audiobook in another room and come back, not feeling like I had missed anything crucial.

While this book tried to humanize every character, to show that war is horrible for everyone….. I don’t think it did enough to show how horrible Nazis were, how passionate for their political views, how violent and angry young men can be. I dont feel like this book was intentionally sanitized, just be aware that there is some suspension of disbelief involved for everything to come together towards the end. I’m personally okay with some of that, I still overall liked the book. However, I didn’t come away from this book feeling like it blew my mind or anything. Just felt like a well written average fictional WWII story.

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erebus53's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Another book club read, and I'm glad I was put onto this one, as I otherwise wouldn't have bothered with it. This is a beautifully woven tale of .. uhm, nerds in World War II.

Werner is a snow-haired German lad who was orphanned by the mines of the Reich. As a curious child he develops himself into an electrical engineer who specializes in fixing radios, and is noticed by a German general who forwards him for advancement in an elite military school.
Marie-Laure is the daughter of keymaster of the French museum. She develops cataracts and goes blind as a child, and her father crates a scale model of her neighbourhood as a tactile map for her to learn her way around.
When the war starts, Marie-Laure and her father flee to her uncle's house, and Werner is a radio engineer for Hitler's army.

This story is told with deep emotional resonance, and using all sorts of literary quirks that focus on themes of light and darkness, sounds, sensation, fear and bravery, morality, logic and puzzles, knowing and learning, art and music, the love of nature, and of people. I love the descriptions of things like disappearing in fog– that it's about vanishing into whiteness rather than shadows. The descriptions are visceral and evocative as well as clever.

This is a story of survival, of war, of fear and bloodshed, and it doesn't pull its punches. It certainly answers, in a humane way, questions about how people can do inhuman things in war, and the toll it can take on families.

I found the going slow, and occasionally tense, but also full of whimsy and beauty in contrast.
Well worth the read.

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