All the Light We Cannot See

The first part pulled me in, but afterward, it slowed down a bit until finally picking up again around 100 pages in.

I really enjoyed the switching POVs and the sort of timeline split before/after the siege of Saint-Malo! Some of Werner’s chapters were a little overly descriptive for my taste. Like I didn’t need a whole paragraph explaining a math equation.

I liked the short chapters, it helped with reading it in my spare moments and being motivated to pick it up more. Personally, I don’t think it needed to be 500+ pages, any historical fiction over 400 pages is doing too much.

The characters were well developed and the writing overall was atmospheric, making me feel like I was there witnessing everything in front of me. I also loved the things around the Sea of Flames myth/stories and would 100% read a book exploring that!

Now aside from the length and dragging pace at times, this was shaping up to be an amazing novel, until a rape scene in the final 40 pages, which was totally unnecessary. I know it’s historically accurate but there are better ways to write it if the author really wanted to include that detail. Also, we barely hear from the character involved for most of the book BUT NOW we hear from them and this is what we get? Ridiculous. It would’ve made more sense if we had been getting their perspective the whole time as well if the author's goal was truly to show all the sufferings of the war.

It felt disconnected, The story was basically done- it serves ZERO purpose to the plot or the character- truly pointless and typical “men writing women.”

It was a great book otherwise but that scene ruined it and I’m dropping down my rating because of that absolute nonsense. The writing was pretty good but adds nothing to the genre (in my opinion) because it’s really just another “wow what horrible things happening to this young girl but she’s being so brave” and “you know guys, what if not all Nazis were bad, like this young soldier here.” So if you also read a lot of WW2 fiction, I’d say skip it.