In the first 28 pages of Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” I was sold. He writes, “Six mornings a week he wakes her before dawn, and she holds her arms in the air while he dresses her. Stockings, dress, sweater. If there’s time, he makes her knot her shoes herself. Then they drink a cup of coffee together in the kitchen: hot, strong, as much sugar as she wants.”
A caring father whose only daughter, Marie-Laure, has been blinded by cataracts at age 6, he constantly teaches her. Utilizing his innovation, he builds her a model of the city of Paris, a replica of all the roads Marie-Laure must pass daily. Her father is also a gifted locksmith and oversees all the locks at the National Museum of Natural History. He teaches his daughter to navigate by touch, then memory.
Another element of the story introduces Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutta, who are orphaned by their father’s death in a coal mine and now reside in a home for such children in Germany.
“Sometimes he and Jutta draw. His sister sneaks up to Werner’s cot, and together, they lie on their stomachs and pass a single pencil back and forth. Jutta, though she is two years younger, is the gifted one.”
Werner, however, is a genius in technology who understands electrical circuits and builds a short wave radio. He is trained in all the mechanics of warfare, and eventually, he and Marie-Laure meet in St. Malo two months after D-Day.
The plot adds many more characters and many more episodes of the hurt and anguish of war as well as an intriguing tale of the Sea of Flames diamond.