Shelly Briscoe

It would be overly simplistic to say this was the best book I have ever read. After all, what is the criteria? Prose? Narrative structure? Character development? Plot execution? This is wholly unlike any book I’ve read. It is dense, not the type of book to plow through at 2 in the morning. It must be savored and sipped like a fine wine. Doerr has intentially and skillfully crafted a story out of small chapters, one or two pages, that interweave our characters and follow them through the destruction of a seaside French town during the German invasion of Paris. Each chapter is short, but thick with masterful prose, vivid and striking with its imagery. We follow Marie-Laure, a French tender aged girl who is blind, but sees the world through curiosity. Her father evacuated them to the seaside town of Saint-Malo, and with them his museum’s prized jewel, a mythical stone known as the Sea of Flames, and it’s legend that it protects its owner, while everyone around perishes. Werner Pfennig is a young German orphan, destined for the coal mines until he demonstrates an uncanny ability to repair electronics, and is enlisted to the brutal school for Nazi youth. We see Werner’s failing desire to do good by others, until a convoy to Saint-Malo sets him on a path to Marie-Laure, a collision course of two points of light. They are surrounded all the different people we have in our own lives. People with no regard for humanity, such as the Nazi scientists searching for the Sea of Flames, in service to Hitler’s perverse quest for the supernatural. People who see the good in others, such as Marie-Laure’s father and uncle, and Werner’s little sister, Jutta. Doer’s ability is to bring the realities of the war-torn families and cities to vivid light. This is not a book that lives on the beaches and the foxholes, but rather in the kitchens and bakeries and orphanages and schools and basements and attics. The book is a slow burn, culminating in a satisfying denouement that leaves the reader pondering another bite at the apple.