Excerpt from All the Light We Cannot See

The year has flown by and it is already December again. Christmas lights twinkle, carols play on the radio, and shopping is in full swing.

And here on my website, I have an Advent Calendar of books! We are five days in and there are seven books waiting to be added to your reader and many more to come. Books last longer than those waxy little chocolates, so hope over to the calendar and collect your first few goodies!

On to my teaser. Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I’m currently working on All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. This little book (545 pages, according to Amazon) is a Pulitzer Prize winner. I don’t read a lot of war stories, but this one intrigued me. Two children whose lives are on a collision course. Opposite sides of the war, connected by radio waves, but unknown to each other. It’s been a pretty good book so far, though the multiple points of view from multiple timelines can be confusing at times.

The curse was this: the keeper of the stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on all those he loved on after another in unending rain.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

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