All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

☕︎☕︎☕︎

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

Anthony Doerr spent ten years writing this book, and you can feel it on every page. The prose, like the title, is filled with a warm glow, and genuinely some of the most beautiful sentences composed in contemporary fiction. The story of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German soldier, converging in occupied Saint-Malo during World War II is structurally ambitious and often breathtaking.

So why only three cups? Because for all its beauty, the book kept me at arm's length. The non-linear structure, jumping back and forth across hundreds of tiny chapters , creates a rhythm I found more exhausting than propulsive. By the midpoint, I was more in awe of the craft than invested in the characters.

It's a book I'm glad I read. It's a book I'd recommend. It's also a book I finished feeling more admiration than love. And one that I have no interest in watching the show. Three cups: gorgeous, worthy, and just a little too in love with its own architecture.