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cindysieden 's review for:
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
I am clearly in the minority here in not enjoying this book, and I have one literary reason and one personal reason.
First, I found the teeny, short chapters, bouncing back and forth between points of view and points in time to be kind of gimmicky and annoying, like I was watching a ping pong match. It prevented me from ever really settling in and feeling like I was getting to know the characters.
But I think even without that, the personal reason--I just shouldn't have picked this book to read at this moment in time. While there have been times in my life when I had spare empathy to spend on the "other" victims of WW2--the Germans who were caught up in a war not of their doing and that they may have opposed without being able to actively resist--at this moment in history, when whatever we should have learned from WW2 seems to be forgotten, I don't have the capacity to empathize with the "very fine people on both sides."
First, I found the teeny, short chapters, bouncing back and forth between points of view and points in time to be kind of gimmicky and annoying, like I was watching a ping pong match. It prevented me from ever really settling in and feeling like I was getting to know the characters.
But I think even without that, the personal reason--I just shouldn't have picked this book to read at this moment in time. While there have been times in my life when I had spare empathy to spend on the "other" victims of WW2--the Germans who were caught up in a war not of their doing and that they may have opposed without being able to actively resist--at this moment in history, when whatever we should have learned from WW2 seems to be forgotten, I don't have the capacity to empathize with the "very fine people on both sides."