In a small town in Germany a young boy and his sister, find a radio. The boy, Werner, is remarkably adept at figuring out how to repair it and soon he and his sister and the other orphans who live with them in Frau Elena’s Children’s Home are able to listen to wonderful musical broadcasts and news from all over Europe including Berlin telling them about the progress of the war. But as the war continues and losses for the Germans begin to mount, the Nazis confiscate or destroy any radios they find, so Werner and his sister hide the radio in the attic and listen to it only at night, long after everyone else has gone to sleep. Night after night Werner and Jutta listen to their favorite broadcast by a Frenchman with a voice like velvet who talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism and even coal and who encourages his listeners to “Open your eyes and see what you can before they close forever” and they are transported from their small village and the war that surrounds them.

In Paris a young girl, Marie, has gone blind. Her mother died when she was born and her father, a master locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History takes her to work with him every day. There he makes he work on a Braille work book for an hour each day and then takes her with him on his rounds as he makes repairs and maintains the locks, and cabinets that hold the thousands of specimens and collections in the museum. Sometimes her father leaves her with Dr. Geffard, a mollusk expert who lets her open the cabinet drawers in his laboratory and hold the the seashells they contain.  At night after they return home and have supper, her father works on the scale model he is building for her of their neighborhood, complete with the boulangerie where they get their bread, and the little park with the four benches and ten trees.

How these two lives become intertwined is the basis of the story, but Doerr’s gift is in the magic of his writing, and the penetrating insights he gives us about these characters and their motivations. As Werner goes into the Nazi training school for boys and Marie and her father flee from Paris for Saint Malo to live with family we are confronted with the wreckage that war makes on lives and the resilience it takes to overcome it’s toll. But even though the story is compelling it is Doerr’s exquisite language and insights which are the dropped like jewelled breadcrumbs through out this book that seduced me.  For example this is what he says about Marie’s blindness:

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

Or this insight about the value of time:

To men like that, time was surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really…it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

 This will be probably one of the best book you will ever read. Savor it and enjoy!

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Stars out of 5)

Recommend this book to: Everyone!

Book Study Worthy? YES

Read in ebook format.