I hope that before our quarantine ends that you have read at least one good book. I finished mine last Saturday. It was called All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. It was excellent. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Without giving too much of the plot away, it tells the parallel stories of a young German orphan, Werner, and a young blind French girl, Marie-Laure growing up during the Second World War. Werner is a whiz with radios and electronics. He ends up going to a boy’s school where he is schooled in the ways of soldiering and gets to use his skill to pinpoint the location of other radios. Marie-Laure lives with her father who works at a museum in Paris. They have to evacuate after the Germans invade France. They move to the coastal town of St. Malo, a real place. The novel weaves back and forth in time, so it takes some wherewithal to figure out what is happening, but once you get into the swing of it, it moves. And to top it all off, there is a priceless diamond that someone is hiding and that other people want.
To tell you more of the plot would be wrong because there are some jawdropping twists that occur, but it is a great read with characters who jump out of the page and into your soul. Even the “bad guy” is fascinating. The theme of the book is a poignant one, something we would do well to consider during these crazy times.
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
And you can be sure you will hear other tidbits of this book in homilies to come. So make sure that you read something before this all blows over.
Father Kevin