All the Light We Cannot See

Apparently I am on a, IShouldReadSadWorldWarIIbooks, kick. I read The Book Thief a couple of months ago and I just recently finished All the Light We Cannot See.  

I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish this book (and felt it the next day at work). I had to see what happened. How was it all going to end?

All the Light We Cannot See is a book based during World War II. Marie-Laure is a French girl who lives with her father in Paris. Her father works at a nearby museum where he is the master of all the keys in the building. Marie-Laure goes blind at a young age and her father builds her a small model of the city so that she can learn her way around and get about by herself. Marie-Laure and her father eventually have to evacuate Paris as the Nazis come and occupy the city. They escape to Saint Malo, a small coastal town in France, where Marie-Laure's crazy great-uncle lives.

Werner is a German boy, who lives with his sister and other orphans in an orphanage in a small German mining town. He and his sister find a broken radio one day and bring it home. Werner studies the radio for awhile and then fixes it quite easily. People in town start to come to him to get their radios fixed. When he comes of age, he is recruited by the Hitler Youth partly because of his knowledge of being able to fix radios and other such instruments.

Of course, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner interconnect at some point. This book is not what I expected it to be, but I really liked it!

The stories in this book tell tales of courage and guilt and love and selfishness and obsession and goodness and doubt etc etc. I thought the book was well written. I really got sucked into the book and grew to like the characters or not like the characters depending on who they were. I must say, though, that the author switches back and forth between time periods and stories and at the beginning I had a hard time keeping track, but it eventually became easier as I grew to know the stories and characters.

Having read The Book Thief in the past couple of months and now this book, I think it's time for a more lighthearted and not so realistic book. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets here I come...