All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Ok so here’s the deal: I almost did not finish reading this book. Why? Because if you were to ever look up the definition of the word “meh” in the dictionary, you’d see an image of this book. Literally, not interesting. I have no idea how this book made it to the best-sellers list of any institution, ever (lookin at you, NYT). And who decided to make it a Pulitzer winner is beyond me. Yes it’s about Germany and Austria during World War II. Yes there are bombs. Yes there is a mystical, giant, blue gem that potentially holds a deadly, God-given curse. Yes, all of these things exist. And yet, it’s STILL BORING.

The story is told through short, 2-3 page chapters that switch off perspective. One chapter you’re reading about a blind girl becoming familiar with her hometown after the loss of her sight and the next you’re reading about an orphaned young boy with an affinity for radios. And while these may seem like they’d be interesting choices to tell this story, I can assure you, at no point was anything interesting. The only redeeming quality of this book was the fact that the young blind girl liked to read books such as Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days.

But other than the occasional sentence of extreme violence (see: a 14-year-old who gets beaten so badly he has permanent brain damage), this book is filled with long, winding passage of pseudo-romance. The author seems to enjoy proselytizing about the sadness of the world or the beauty of the ocean amidst the horrors of World War II. But the only thing he manages to achieve is to make me supremely bored. He writes pages and pages of romantic thoughts that never actually say anything. And while he does all of this, he feels it necessary to completely mistreat his characters. One page you’re reading about a loving father and the next he disappears with no explanation and you never hear about him again while being left with the assumption that perhaps he perished in a concentration camp(?). Who knows? And then Doerr literally explodes one of the main characters. Just like that. Boom. That’s it. Gone. No preamble. No resolution. The end.

Overall, I would never recommend this book to anyone who wishes to read an interesting book. But if you feel that pages worth of fake romantic descriptions of buildings and sea-creatures are interesting, then go for it.

Rating: 1 out of 5 (it gets one star simply because the author had the balls to write a story about World War II from the perspective of a German person who romanticizes being a Nazi)