Book Synopsis:
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
My Review:
4/5 stars. This was a great and compelling story with beautiful prose. I loved the portrayal of blindness with Marie-Laure. Both of the main characters had interesting stories in completely different ways, and it was cool to see how everything came together in the end.
This book took me almost three months to read because it's so long. I took a break from it around Christmas in order to get a few shorter, last-minute books in to reach my reading goal for the year, but even without that it took me a long time. I don't think the length was an issue, though. The super short chapters kept it pretty fast-paced and it didn't often feel too slow.
My favorite part of this book was the amazingly accurate representation of blindness. I feel like, in fiction, there's two ends of the spectrum when it comes to the portrayal of a blind character. You either get a completely stereotyped character that is over-the-top and sometimes demeaning, or you have a Daredevil type of character where the fact that they're blind basically doesn't matter because they have some magical ability to "see" anyway.
In this story, however, the character of Marie-Laure was one of the best blind characters I've ever read about. She uses a cane and she reads novels in Braille - two completely normal things that most times get forgotten. Her dad gives her O&M skills by helping her learn her way around the city she lives in. She learns to use her others senses to experience the world. The fact that she's blind also isn't her whole personality. It's an important aspect, but the book doesn't hit readers over the head with reminders that she's blind. In a lot of ways, her story could be exactly the same even if she was sighted.
Marie-Laure's story was more interesting to me, but Werner's was compelling, too. He goes from a boy who joins the Nazi youth because he doesn't fully understand it to someone with convictions who starts to doubt the cause. By the end, he's fully disobeying orders and saving Marie-Laure's life.
Speaking of, I liked seeing how everything connected in the end. Once Werner's group came into Saint Malo and he was listening for radio frequencies, I could see everything coming together. I like books that do that - multiple perspectives with separate stories that eventually become one story.
The plot was so engaging and I was very invested the whole way through. That was helped by the alternating POVs and switching timelines periodically. As something exciting happened in one character's story, it would suddenly switch to a new character or go back to a previous time in that character's story, making me impatient to keep reading to find out how it continued.
One thing toward the end that surprised me was Werner's death. I genuinely didn't expect one of the two main characters to die. It was pretty shocking.
Content Guide:
Language: Strong language, but not used very often. Sh-- and f-- were both used a few times. Milder words like b---rd and w--re were also used once.
Sexual Content: One small scene had lots of inappropriate sexual discussions between two members of Werner's unit. Close to the end, multiple girls were raped by Russian soldiers. It wasn't outright said, but the actions described make it clear that's what's happening.
Violence and Gore: It's a pretty gory book. There are lots of descriptions of blood, shooting people, corpses, etc.
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