The power finally goes off at 2:00 a.m. The iPad hits the floor for the night. Exhaustion sets in and eyes strain against the glow of the lamp, the only other light in the dark room. I am emotionally taxed, spending the last nine hours doing nothing but reading. Instead of a text book or handout though I am reading for fun. Yes, you read that correctly. I was reading for fun (some people still do that).

While the latest John Greene novel such as “The Fault in Our Stars” is classified as an amazing read (we’ve all read it so you know what I mean) I choose to embark on a different genre of literary triumph. This time I went for Anthony Doerr’s “All The Light We Cannot See”, a novel published May of this year set in World War 2 era Europe. In this touching take on both Nazi, Germany and occupied Paris Doerr explores the lives of young Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind girl from Paris and Werner Pfenning, an orphan growing up in Germany. He cleverly starts the novel off throwing readers into a wartime battle on the French shores of Saint-Malo island depicting what is found out later in the novel as D-Day.  As the novel continues Doerr sends readers back in bundles of chapters to the characters pasts, allowing us to see the two children grow up, both experiencing the effects of Nazi reign in their home lands.

Throughout the novel the author does more then just tell the tale of two kids growing up in nazi occupation, instead Doerr uses beautiful symbolism to convey what their life really entailed. Light was one of the major symbolic references comparing the prestigious Nazi training school Werner gets into as sucking the light out of the unique individual. As Janet said in her New York Times review of the novel, “Mr. Doerr puts his characters in this surprisingly fresh and enveloping book.”

As the novel goes in and out the present, in this case D-Day, and in the children’s pasts readers are aware that at some point in the book that the two meet up during the fighting in the opening of the novel on the shores of the French coast. This element adds an extra sense of urgency as readers turn the page in hopes of the next chapter being the one where the two characters finally meet each other. We are rewarded in the end, but not for long.

Crust gathers in the corner where the tears have been collecting for what seems as hours now. With each turn of the page, or swipe if you are reading from a kindle or ipad, sadness builds up as readers are acquainted with war and the deaths transpired during this era. Doerr does something special in this novel though, as instead of instead of weeping over the outcomes of WWII readers are shedding tears because of the characters they have begun to know in the past 530 pages. So while this may not be the teen romance or dystopian future novel that holds a popular place our heart’s, this novel is something more. Doerr dips into a world foreign to us, a different time showing readers through his two main characters the importance of the light that love illuminates through the world.