An Emotional Rollercoaster: Critique and Praise of All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - Review by Abigail Guo '28

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr isn’t just an award-winning novel about a French girl and a German boy coming of age. It’s a force. Potent, moving, and rich, it left me marveling over its beauty and reeling over its tragedy long after I turned the last page. 

Doerr is an adroit artist with words. Concise sentence fragments coexist masterfully with long, meandering run-ons. The fragments adequately express impulsion, realization, and quick switches. The run-ons, adorned with poignant metaphors, provide a glimpse of omniscience. But there’s a caveat. Imagery and description, though exquisite, is occasionally overdone, much like artisan tea with too much sugar. The pacing is significantly hindered as a result.

The novel takes place during World War Two, told in the dual perspectives of Marie-Laure in France and Werner Pfennig in Germany. Werner strives to be an engineer, but puts his trust in the Reich, a merciless dictatorship, to get him there. The moral ambiguity of Frank Volkheimer alongside the ruthlessness of von Rumpel was an excellent choice as well. It articulated contrasts between two German military figures, illustrating the intersections of duty and free will. Daniel LeBlanc, Marie’s father, fell into  the cliché of the doting parent, a missed opportunity to explore the nuanced relationship between a parent and their disabled child. Yet across the Marie and Werner, Doerr’s writing style remains the same. It would be more effective if he differentiated between the protagonists and adopt a style tailored to each. The character design is satisfactory, producing complex characters that are unmistakably human. 

There are almost too many petals to the rose. The double (and eventually triple) point-of-view, coupled with blurrings of the past and present, make for a complex storyline that is elegant yet overly intricate. Occasionally, to settle a plot confusion, I found myself flipping back through the novel…and a dictionary. Speaking of which, the story is packed with fancy words—so much so that the consistent trips to Merriam-Webster tainted my enjoyment. But once you find your way through the maze, you will see that the plot wasn’t so complex after all. It’s almost…predictable. Some twists or turns or loopty loops would have been nice.

On the contrary, when each point-of-view converges, central messages shine through in delightfully unexpected ways. This book meditates on a multitude of themes. It is a patchwork quilt of free will when bound by loyalty, lust for wealth but resistance thereof, and glimmers of light in the midst of darkness. Above all, it ponders if and how good exists in a world tormented by evil. At first glance this screams cliché, but the secondary themes illuminate it with novelty.

Despite the complicated plot knots, all the threads are tied together with motifs, themes, and repeated phrases that elicit a tear out of the reader—in rejoice or sorrow or both—you’ll relish it all. All The Light We Cannot See no doubt deserves the title of contemporary classic.