All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a historical fiction novel set in World War II-era France and Germany. The book follows the stories of two young teenagers: Marie-Laure LeBlanc from Paris and Werner Pfennig from the Zollverein mining complex in Germany. Werner is an orphaned boy living with his sister, Jutta, and several other children in a home for orphans. Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her father, who works at the Museum of Natural History. She is blind and navigates the city with a 3-dimensional model that her father created for her. During the war, Germans invade Paris and Marie and her father escape to safety in Saint-Malo, where her great-uncle lives (though Saint-Malo is also soon invaded). Werner is fascinated by technology and mechanics, especially radios. He fixes radios for his town, and is eventually noticed by and sent to a school that trains the Hitler Youth. Werner travels to Saint-Malo in the military, and meets Marie-Laure there after the city is bombed. When one of Werner’s military commanders tries to capture Marie-Laure, Werner helps save her by shooting the commander. I chose to read All the Light We Cannot See because it was a book that I had already planned on reading, to be completely honest. I owned a copy and was looking forward to getting into it, and when this project arose, I thought the book would work perfectly! I knew that the main characters were living in WWII and that one of them was blind, and the other an orphan. The era and the struggles the two main characters had are both things that I have never experienced, and likely will never experience in my lifetime. However, upon getting into the first few chapters of the book, I became concerned- I related too much to the characters! I thought that I was going to have to backtrack and choose a different book before I realized something. This challenge is supposed to challenge our perception of life and see the world from another person’s eyes. But, while we all go through different experiences and have different identities, we are all human. The stories from this book represent pains, losses, fears, and joys that I have felt, though through different circumstances. “We are mice, he thinks, and the sky swirls with hawks” (Doerr 89). From the very beginning, this book showcases feelings of fear and feeling alone in the world. This quote from early in the book comes from a moment where Marie-Laure’s father was concerned for both of their lives. His metaphor shows the Germans acting as hawks, surrounding and never ceasing their search, and he and Marie-Laure acting as mice, afraid and constantly running away. This moment was one of the most impactful parts of the book to me, because I’ve never felt a fear that great or all-encompassing. Throughout the book, Marie-Laure and Werner are presented with life-or-death situations that I would never encounter in my day-to-day life. Both children feel very alone at times, with Marie-Laure being blind and losing her family and Werner being orphaned and an “odd-ball” at his school. I have felt alone before, but not to such extremes. The wartime setting opened my eyes to the hardships that families, children especially, had to go through. Though, from reading All the Light We Cannot See, I gained more than just knowledge about what it’s like to live during war, as a blind girl, or as an orphaned boy. I was reminded of how truly connected we all are -how very real the human experience is- and that despite our differences, we can all feel deep empathy for one another. Sarah P.
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AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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November 2022
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