Our book this month was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
Not only was it a hit but, for most of us that read it and were at the meeting, it was our favorite book we read this year. For me, personally, it will be in my top five books of all time. It is a historical fiction, which is usually one of our favorites genres and it did not disappoint.
The story is set during WWII and is about a blind french girl and a german boy, who has been chosen as one of Hitlers' Youth. These two characters will eventually meet one day near the very end of the war. As of our meeting neither Lindsay nor Pat had finished the book, so I'm not going to go into further detail about the story line.
Lisa, who sent us her review before leaving for her trip, found the sequence in which it was written confusing, as it is not written in chronological order. We all agreed that, yes, at first we were also confused. I had to look at the index to figure out exactly what the author was doing, by going back and forth in time. For instance, the first eight chapters (all the chapters are very short) are about just one day, Aug. 7, 1944. Then chapters 9-31 are about the two main characters and their lives as young children starting in 1934. Next thing you know, with chapter 32, you are back to Aug. 1944, but the day is now the 8th, and so on and so forth. So, through almost the entire length of the book just a few days in Aug. 1944 are woven, a few chapters at a time, amongst the rest of the book that tells the story of both main characters childhoods and then their teen years during the war, the roles they played in the war and, what eventually brings them together for just a few hours on that one day in August. The chapters about those days in August were written like a thriller and as the time progressed from Aug. 7 to the 9th, it got more and more nerve wracking and we all admitted to being literally riveted by those chapters. Another minor weakness of the book was the end. For Lisa, as she said, it felt "rushed". I can't say that it felt rushed, as a matter of fact, at the meeting, I couldn't really put my finger on why the end was ever so slightly disappointing. So, today, I just spent two hours rereading the end just to see if I felt the same about it! It sat much better with me this time and I think I was just so disappointed that (someones whose name I'll not mention) died.
Collectively as a group, we thought Doerr's writing was just beautiful and wonderfully descriptive without being overly done. We loved all of the characters, not just the main characters, but the supporting cast as well and, we were all very attached to them. One of my complaints with our book from Aug., The Secret Keeper was that the author wrote way to much detail about people that were not strong characters in the book, making parts of it boring. Not the case with this book. We discussed how neither the story of the stone nor the connection between Werner and Marie-Laure (which was the radio shows made by Marie's grandfather) felt contrived, which had it not been written so well, could have. It was a really good meeting with so many talking points that we ended up discussing just the mystery of the house/stone/key for more than an hour!
It took Doerr ten years to write this novel and it won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2014. Admittedly, one of the ONLY Pulitzer winners our club has EVER really enjoyed!
Eight of us read and rated the book. The lowest rating was a 3.5 the highest a 5, given by four of us. So, it receives an overall rating of 4.65.
Next months book is Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. Our meetings are now going back to the SECOND Friday of the month, which in November is Friday, the 13th. Lindsay will be our discussion leader.
Hope to see you all there!
Kellie
