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A review by ronnie_z
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2.0
This is not a two because it was poorly written—in fact, this book has some of the most beautiful prose I've seen in a long while. I felt moved and caught up by the descriptive language in ways that it made the backdrop of WWII feel like white noise, something that the book was very much trying to convey through the eyes of everyday, normal people. Someone in a review said it made the war palatable, a PG-13 version of it. On one hand, I'm almost glad for it—war comes with so much triggering content, and requires some mental fortitude to get into. Here, everything happened like it was in a dreamlike state. Towards the end, a rape scene was glossed over in a way that felt so incredibly hamfisted that it sent me spiraling into displeasure. I found that I couldn't finish the book with the same note of enjoyment I had when I started.
The constant shifting of perspectives and timelines between chapters is also a lot to keep up with. I think it would have worked well in smaller, more sporadic chunks, to highlight specific parts of the story, but it made the entire book feel spread thin. It took so long for the story to piece together that by the time it did, the characters crossed paths for barely a day before life steamrolled right on, and the entire experience left me feeling rather indifferent to what happened to the characters and how. Incredible, lackluster characters.
The constant shifting of perspectives and timelines between chapters is also a lot to keep up with. I think it would have worked well in smaller, more sporadic chunks, to highlight specific parts of the story, but it made the entire book feel spread thin. It took so long for the story to piece together that by the time it did, the characters crossed paths for barely a day before life steamrolled right on, and the entire experience left me feeling rather indifferent to what happened to the characters and how. Incredible, lackluster characters.