May 2026 Book Club Summary

• Plot Summary (from author’s website):

  “Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood—every house, every sewer drain—so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris in June of 1940, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan named Werner grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure’s.”

• Author’s Website
• Author’s Biography (from author’s website): “Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio [he now lives in Boise, Idaho]. He is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and the novels About Grace, All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award…”
• Author’s memoir about living in Europe (Italy, not France) “Four Seasons in Rome” (mentioned by book club member Diane)
• Author’s other Books
• Author Interviews:
  • Q&A on author’s website on “All The Light We Cannot See”
  • Video (all videos have captions)
    • Library of Congress YouTube Video in conversation with “Director Shawn Levy, author Anthony Doerr, and accessibility consultant Joe Strechay discuss the authentic adaptation of the acclaimed novel for a Netflix limited series. The conversation highlights the collaborative efforts to represent characters with visual impairments and explores the production’s commitment to inclusive storytelling and historical detail.” (link to text transcript of video.)
    • Simon & Schuster video with Doerr  where he talks about his inspirations for the novel (yes, originally he got the idea seeing someone frustrated with a dropped phone call, etc.)
• An NPR All Things Considered interview with Anthony Doerr (audio with transcript and article) where the author talks about his inspiration for the book, etc.
• A Medium interview with Doerr where the author talks about how this is his second novel with a blind character and why he chooses to write blind characters as a sighted author.
• Further Reading suggestions on the WWII topic from author’s website
• The Pulitzer Prize website linked to 2015 the year Doerr won for “All The Light We Cannot See.” (scroll down to the Books, Drama and Music section to see it). You can see the other novels he was up against.
• Critical reception of book by the disability community:
  • This article on the book by a blind writer.
• Historical Significance:
  • Of Place: The Battle of Saint-Malo
  • Of Disability: Disability during wartime (WWII specifically):
    • A website (Holocaust Encyclopedia) with an entry on how the Nazis treated people with disabilities (warning, this is disturbing content)
    • Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website: featuring information and video on the “T4 Programme” by the Nazis which was a euthanasia program enacted on people with perceived physical and mental disabilities.
    • Doerr mentioned in this article that he read a memoir of a French blind man who lived during the war, “And There Was Light” By Jacques Lusseyryan (the book is reviewed here on the American Council for the Blind website)
• Critical Reception of Book:
  • Reader Reviews [from GoodReads] (average rating is 4.31)
  • Professional Reviewer Reviews (listed as “rave/positive” on this site called Book Marks that aggregates professional reviews)
• Things Discussed:
  • • Remembering Characters and plots/details in Fiction Books: Several members finished the book and others were still reading. Even those who finished were unclear on various plot points so I found a few websites to help refresh memories (WARNING: if you haven’t finished the book I wouldn’t look at these links yet)
      • This Book Companion website offers a comprehensive listing of all 63 characters.
      • This website LitCharts offers Summaries of the plot and each chapter, characters, etc.
      • CliffsNotes-characters (has a good character summary of each, includes what happens to Werner as I know a few couldn’t remember exactly.)
      • The general CliffsNotes entry on the novel has summaries and analysis of each chapter, etc.
      • A cheat I used during book club was to use the Google AI feature to ask questions about the book (a cheat, but helps jog the memory).
    • Miniatures:
      • How they built miniature models for the Netflix miniseries (from the Netflix website Tudum)
      • As I mentioned there are many who create miniatures and share their work online, see this article for a list of a few. The person I mentioned who knits figures “Frog and Toad” and creates miniature worlds for them and creates mesmerizing short form videos is: @indiarosecrawford
      • Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, AZ: The Mini Time Machine
    • Preserving valuables during war:
      • There was a group formed by the government to do just that: preserve: “The Monuments Men”
      • Hiding crown jewels (a Hungarian scientist’s account)
      • The Hesse Heist jewel account
  • Other books on WWII:
    • Nonfiction: A fairly comprehensive list on GoodReads (“Band of Brothers” and “The Longest Day…” are included”
    • Fiction: A fairly comprehensive list on GoodReads (“The Nightingale and “All The Light…” are included)
• About the Netflix miniseries of “All The Light We Cannot See”:
  • A YouTube review of the Netflix miniseries
  • Differences between the book and the Netflix miniseries: Vanity Fair article, NPR review
  • The Cast and movie details on iMDB
  • An article on the accessibility focus of the Netflix series

Next Book Clubs:

As always, the book list order for the rest of 2026 can be viewed on our Book Club webpage that you can view here at any time: https://www.hlaatc.org/book-club/