Review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

20 pages into the book, only five percent in, I can feel tears swelling in my eyes and dread filling my heart as  I read. Like a fortune-teller, years of being a bookworm have taught me how to read plots and characters even only a few pages in. Most stories follow patterns based on genres, and I enjoyed them mostly to savor the words and details, not to know how it end, because in the end, most stories follow a predictable pattern. I knew, only thirty pages in, which characters were going to die. As I flip the last pages and finished my sobbing, I cross-checked my list with reality. It came in a 100%. All of my predictions came true.

Yet as I turn the pages, I couldn't stop reading. Mr Doerr had a way with words, the chapters are short, but beautiful and you ache for the characters, you ache for their plight and unrealized potential. More than six hours I spent reading this book, and in the last three, I prayed to god every minute that my precious babies are safe and sound and unhurt even though I know they are going to be hurt anyway. But still I prayed, going against what the literary gods have dictated, hoping, hoping that there's a twist at the end of the book, that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that everything, everything is miraculously fine.

Alas, it did not happen. But this book, this book has sparked something deep in me. Over the years, I've become a bit bored by the stores and novels which I read, however, reading this has brought me something fierce that I hadn't felt in quite some time. I am exhilarated. I feel alive. I feel like I was there, in Saint-Malo, crouched in a cramped chimney, listening to the crackle and the hums of the radio. My guts twisted when we got into Werner's part with the Nazi Youth. I cried, praying to god to keep Marie-Laure safe please, please, please. Pity and dread churned in me as I read Werner's plight in the Wehrmacht, the German Army. I sympathize with the characters. In front of me, they become more than words on papers. I feel like a god, looking down on my own miniature Saint-Malo and the Academy, watching wooden figures of Marie-Laure and Werner go about their lives, until finally they meet that fateful day in the walled city of Brittany.

I am Matilda again, sitting in a library chair with a book, travelling all around the world while not moving a single inch - right at the time when I felt that I was too old to be Matilda, that the magic's gone. But it's not gone - it never will go out. All it takes is to light it again is the right kind of story, one that this novel fits perfectly.