All The Light We Cannot See
As a ham radio operator and aspiring electrical engineer, I love consuming media about technology but there is shockingly little out there in terms of radio. I can think of three other pieces of fictional media that I'm aware of that center around radio, and they're the movies Contact, Frequency, and UHF (with Weird Al...). So, when I was recommended All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (knowing nothing other than it has a Netflix adaptation) and told it has a radio element to it, it shot up my to-read list and I finally got around to it over the past month.
I've never really been one for historical fiction about war, I find it a bit too gritty and niche in a sense - I'd much rather read real stories from that period1. But, Doerr presents this in an interesting enough way that it almost feels disconnected from World War II outside of it being the immediate setting. The reader isn't presented with violent scenes of battle and trench warfare, but rather intimate stories of a variety of characters - each unique in both story and style.
As for the radio use of interest to me, Doerr does a decent job at portraying radio communications in an accurate manner that really does add to the story. Typically when radio enters a book, it'll be a brief mention that wildly misrepresents the actual capabilities of the tech, but this certainly stands out from the crowd in that regard.
My one complaint stems from the fact that tracking 3 different "main" characters through a series of winding timelines - jumping back and forth between the "present day" and flashbacks constantly - it becomes a bit hard to follow in the sense of what characters are doing and what they already know. Although this is mostly remedied by sections of flashback being long enough to reduce that confusion.
I found the ending to be a bit melancholy, which to me seemed right for the atmosphere set but also is never really my favorite ending to any story. I'm trying to avoid details and spoilers for this review, so I'll leave it at that as it is a bit up for interpretation.
Overall, I'd give this book a 4.75 out of 5 stars. I found it absolutely fantastic - although it took me a while to finish it, I spent every reading session rapt in the story for at least an hour which is fairly impressive for me!
After writing this, I do still agree with this statement but I think it sums up my views better to simply say: it feels weird to write stories about fake war experiences instead of acknowledging real ones.↩