As of this writing, there are 6,193 reviews on Amazon of Anthony Doerr's novel All the Light We Cannot See. Nearly all of them are four or five star reviews. It's been on the NYTimes Best Seller List for 35 weeks, and its success has surprised even the author itself. In general, I think there are two types of NYT best selling books: those that are there because they appeal to the greatest common denominator—lots of people enjoy that kind of book—or because they are really, truly good.

Light, for me, is the second type.

In case you haven't read it (I only finally got my hands on a copy through possibly-frowned-upon librarian machinations), it tells the story of Marie, a blind girl growing up in France as World War II begins, and Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany during the same time. Marie's father is the locksmith at the Museum of Natural History; he creates keys and locks, and distributes them, to protect the museum's acquisitions. (I don't think it ever tells us what happened to her mother.) Werner lives in an orphanage in Essen, the mining district of Germany; his father was killed in a coal mine. Each character has a transition: Marie moves to St. Malo, an ancient city on the coast of France, after the invasion of Paris, while Werner's natural instinct for science, math, and specifically radio is discovered by a Nazi official, who arranges for him to be sent to the school at Schulpforta, where Nazis were created out of ordinary boys.

This is not a perfect book. (The more I read, the less I believe a "perfect book" can even exist.) The antagonist, Reinhold von Rumpel, is a German diamond expert who has been tasked with finding the most valuable item the Museum owned, a jewel that may or may not be cursed. But he is too flatly evil, too based on stereotypes, to be truly menacing to the reader. Also, I wanted Werner to have more of a moral conflict than he did. He is clearly uncomfortable with what he is being taught, but he doesn't make any waves. Finally, the structure might bother some readers. I happen to like books that move backward and forward through time, but I know that many readers like a more straightforward movement.

Still, I thoroughly loved this book. It has a gentle sort of approach to a brutal time, and in that sense it would be good for several of my friends, the ones who don't like reading books about the Holocaust or World War II because they're too depressing. Nearly all of the violence in the story happens off screen, so you know bad things are occurring but it isn't described so there are no images to linger in your memory. Again, that is not something that everyone will appreciate, and it isn't something I need, but the absence of detailed horrors made it easier for me to see the characters as ordinary people caught in an extraordinary time.

In fact, time itself almost seems to be its own character (another reason why the movement back and forth in time didn't bother me; it felt appropriate to the story's themes). This ties in with that jewel, which Marie's father may or may not have in his possession. All of the queens who might have danced with it strung as a pendant around their necks, and the princes or kings set in their crowns. But it also overlaps in the radio program that Marie's grandfather recorded and that Werner, years later, hears. And the end, which gathers up strings and tries to tie them off. As tied off as stories can be. As time is also one of my life's themes, this appealed to me especially.

If you haven't read the book, there are spoilers coming up in the next paragraph!

The book's weakness for me was Werner. He is never whole heartedly a Nazi, but it is not until the very, very end that he tries to resist what is happening. What is happening—that is the key. It happens to him, but he never happens to it. When he finally does, it cannot redeem him from the other things he let happen. Of course, maybe I am expecting too much from him. Maybe his not​ resisting is the point: this is how ordinary Germans became part of a monstrosity. Still, even if he hadn't externally resisted, his internal thoughts and ideas could have rebelled. I wanted a little bit more from him.

But that is a minor argument against a book I thoroughly enjoyed.