A novel set between 1934 and 1945, the time of WW2. The book revolves around the characters of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, who takes refuge with her father Daniel, in her great-uncle Etienne’s house in Saint-Malo, after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany – and Werner Pfennig, a German boy who is accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology.
Comments:
- I thoroughly enjoyed it, it’s very moving, brilliant!
- Not the type of book I would normally have chosen.
- All the characters are well-drawn.
- I expected the stories of the two principal characters to intertwine more; eventually they did.
- The barbarism of the military school, even towards their own pupils, was horrific and hard to read.
- The chapters being out of chronological order threw me a bit, though they were well labelled as to date. I struggled initially to get on with the time/person changes.
- The short chapters made it easy to read just one more . . . and following the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner made for an interesting plot that kept me hooked.
- The end of the story and the modern-day bit surprised me. Ends were tied up as far as they could be, though not all the characters survived the war.
- The choice of a blind principal character was interesting; we learned how someone who is blind can cope in a predominantly sighted world.
- The descriptions are evocative and perhaps could be described as “lyrical” or “flowery”.
Marks out of ten: 6.5,9 x 6, 10.