Starr’s Mill drama teacher Savahna Silvas recently read “All of the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr.

“All of the Light We Cannot See” is a historical fiction novel set in occupied France in World War II. The story follows Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner Pfennig, an orphaned boy from Germany. Upon the Nazi invasion in France, Marie-Laure and her father escape to her estranged great uncle’s house in the walled-in city of Saint-Malo. 

“It focuses on two different storylines, one young lady and one young man,” Silvas said.

Werner and his younger sister live in a poor mining town in Germany where their only source of entertainment comes from a radio. The radio feeds the siblings tales of stories from other countries they have never been to. 

Werner would tinker with any electronics he could get his hands on, which got him enlisted by the Nazi party to track down a resistance group. Only to find that Marie-Laure is part of the resistance.

Silvas heard of this book a while back but was hesitant to read it because she was not sure she would like historical fiction. Recently, she saw one of her students reading it in class and decided to give it a try. 

“At the beginning, it was kind of weird because every chapter was only about a page, which is something you don’t normally get,” Silvas said. 

In the novel, each chapter would focus on either Marie-Laure or Werner in their own lives leading up to the climax when they finally come together. The chapters in “All of the Light We Cannot See” share the different struggles of people growing up in Germany and France during this war. 

Realistic fiction books about World War II tend to move slow when it comes to plot development. With a book like “All the Light We Cannot See,” however, readers are struggling to put down their books.