So, for July we read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Goodreads: 4.32 Stars
Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
Book Club: 2.5 Stars
Of our 4 Book Clubbers only 2 of us (me included) finished this book. This was a 500 plus page book, which I normally veer away from because it is usually a red flag saying too much detail, in my opinion, I normally like the more simple books! This is the good and bad thing about book club though, we get all kinds of books which I enjoy but we definitely have hit and miss at times.
This book had tons of 5 star reviews but shockingly we just didn’t feel the same.
I didn’t care for the jumping back and forth between people and timezones, it made it confusing and hard to follow at times. The intertwining of the characters wasn’t as great as I thought it would be, and it was overall a letdown, you get all this build up for a not so wonderful, and short encounter. The story, just seemed slow and tended to drag at times, and I was less than please by the ending and wrap up!
Well we win some and lose some!
We will be reading The Hundred Foot Journey this month so check back in for that review.
A little FLOUR, A lot of LOVE 