All the Light We Cannot See
I can't decide whether or not I like this book. It is true that it was beautifully written and amazingly constructed. It bounces between two lives, running nearly parallel to each other before and during World War II. Those lives affect each other in myriad unexpected ways, though they only intersect once, for a few brief hours. Marie-Laure, a blind, French girl, is intelligent and resilient, lending her talents to the resistence after her father is arrested. Werner Pfennig is a Nazi, so enthralled with math and radios that he is willing to do just about anything to pursue them further, including follow orders that he knows he probably shouldn't. Part of my problem with this book is that it asks me to sympathize with Pfennig. And there are times when he is sympathetic. But he's also a coward. His resistance comes too late and is arguably too little. He saves one girl, but it's mostly because he failed to save another one. And this all would have been okay, and I ...