On Mondays, we are lucky to link up to share books we've read that are for children and teens with Jen at TeachMentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders. Others link to share adult books with Sheila at Book Journeys who started the meme a long time ago. It's great to read about so many good books available, new and old! Come visit, and tweet at #IMWAYR. Thanks to Jen, Kellee, and Ricki for hosting!
See the buttons on the right for Myra Garces-Bacsal's Gathering Books Award Winning Book Challenge and the MustReadIn2015 challenge hosted by Carrie Gelson at There's A Book for That. You can read my "must read" list above. The following book meets the criteria for both these lists.
It's been a long time since I read nearly all one day. I guess one reason is that I'm on vacation. And the second one is that All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a wonder of a book. It also won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. First of all, I loved the adult complexity of the book, the way that Doerr wove his story back and forth among characters and back and forth in time. The story is set before, during and after World War II, includes several interesting characters, but the main ones are Werner, a gifted young orphan who is German, and who gets the chance to go to a special school for preparing boys for war (unheard of for his background) and a young girl, blind, living with her father who works at the Natural History Museum in Paris. The characters, the details in their lives, and the events surrounding them built with such tension, continually parallel and intertwine. I sometimes had to stop and wonder what I would do in such a time, or I would stop to re-read a passage to be sure I hadn't missed anything or to appreciate the beautiful language. The parts included that touch on light in hundreds of ways are magical. Here are a few examples of sentences I marked. Concerning peaches after an arduous escape from Paris: "Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight." When a soldier enters a room of children in an orphanage: "His handgun is black; it seems to draw all the light in the room toward it." Upon a first experience at the ocean: "At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light." When one of the main characters is asking questions of life: "Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?" I marked many more. This may not be the book for you, but it certainly pleased me.
