We are in 2014, the year the book was published. Marie-Laure walks with her grandson, and she seems happy. She reflects on her life and the lives of others who played an important role in her life. She thinks, “And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings?” (346). She gets to her apartment, and her grandson Michel says goodbye to her. They will meet again next week.

This was a nice ending to the book, but endings like this make me so sad. It’s like “Nineteen Years Later” in Harry Potter but worse because Marie is an old woman. I like how the bird symbolism throughout the book is included in this last part. Frederick’s love for birds reflects his innocence and good intentions. The comparison of Marie-Laure’s father, Etienne, Madame Manec, and Werner to birds reflects that they deserve to be free wherever they are in the afterlife.

It still disturbs me that Marie’s father was never found. How could he disappear completely? The logical conclusion is that he was killed, and that’s realistic. It just bothers me that we don’t know for sure what happened.

Final Thoughts

My economics teacher told me that this was her favorite book, but I was initially baffled as to why. I felt like the plot was very slow until about 2/3 of the way into the book. It got exciting then, and I really liked it afterwards. I can now see why some people deeply enjoy this book. Emotional books are a fun journey, but it always takes a long recovery time for me before I want to read another emotional book. I would definitely recommend this book, but it was hard for me to get through the first 2/3 as it was honestly quite boring. It felt like drudgery, but I think most books feel slow at the beginning.

I think that every book I read contributes to my knowledge and therefore impacts me to a certain extent. This book had a significant impact on my perspective of war. The emphasis of the horrors of war is similar to Slaughterhouse-Five and The Things They Carried. However, this is the first book I’ve read in which the author also shows the negative actions of Allied soldiers in WWII.

This blog was fun to write, and much less difficult than I thought it would be. Maybe someday I’ll make a blog. I’m not sure what topic I’d like to write about.

Doerr continues to highlight the brutality of the war. He also conveys the message that the Allied powers were not universally “good” as we in the western world may be led to believe. In Part 11, the Soviets occupy Berlin, and there is a jarring rape scene. Three Russians, two of them young boys, break into the apartment that Frau Elena, Jutta, and other girls from the orphanage share. All of the girls and women are raped by the soldiers. After reading this, I searched up more information about rapes during WWII, and it’s pretty horrifying that we only learn about the brutality committed by the other side during the war. Americans, Soviets, and other allied powers participated in mass rapes after occupying Axis power countries such as Germany.

Part 12 takes us to about 30 years after the war. Volkheimer works as a radio repairman, and he suffers from PTSD. He thinks about the people he has killed in the war. He receives a letter regarding Werner’s belongings recovered from the war. Hence, he reflects on his relationship with Werner and thinks to himself, “But was it decent to leave him out there like that? Even after he was dead?” (325). This part made me tear up a little because although Volkheimer’s loyalties lay with the Wehrmacht, he really cared about Werner.

Jutta lives with her husband, Albert, and they have a six-year-old son, Max. One day, Volkheimer visits Jutta and brings Werner’s belongings including his journal and Marie-Laure’s model neighborhood. They talk a little, and he soon leaves. Jutta decides to take a trip to Saint-Malo with Max to find Marie-Laure. They then go to the Natural History Museum in Paris, and Jutta gives the Saint-Malo replica to Marie-Laure. They talk about Werner and Marie-Laure’s short time spent with him.

Marie-Laure has never been able to find her father even with extensive investigations. She and Etienne travelled together after the war, and he died later at 82. She now has a 19-year-old daughter, Hélène, who she had with John, a man she has separated with but met in graduate school.

It’s really nice to see Marie and Jutta meet. It’s crazy that Marie and Werner’s encounter for a few hours in Saint-Malo led to Jutta bringing her son to Paris to meet Marie. The war brought them together, but the war also killed Werner. These two parts were again very emotional to me because of my soft spot for Volkheimer’s relationship with Werner, and Jutta has always been a very admirable character. Seeing her succeed in life after the war is such a stark juxtaposition to the rest of the story. It makes me sad that Werner is no longer there with Jutta and Marie’s father is no longer with her, but I am glad that Jutta and Marie-Laure have relatively happy lives.

 

I read Part 10 in the morning, and I kept thinking about what happened in this part all day. I get so emotionally attached to characters in books, movies, and TV shows, and that is why I am always hesitant to pick up a book or watch a movie that I know is very emotionally taxing. When something devastating happens in something that I am reading or watching, I usually have trouble sleeping because I keep thinking about it. I am not exaggerating about this. This book makes me so sad!

To a certain extent, Werner and Marie save each other’s’ lives. I emphasize the “certain extent” part of the sentence. When Werner and Volkheimer are trapped in the cellar, Volkheimer hears piano music coming from Marie’s broadcast on the radio. He is extremely weak, but the music gives him the will to stand up, and he and Werner blast a grenade through the ceiling. The two boys, extremely dehydrated and starving, escape. This is how Marie-Laure indirectly saves Werner and Volkheimer. Volkheimer goes to search for food while Werner goes to Marie’s house. He encounters Von Rumpel who is about to shoot at Werner, but Werner quickly shoots and kills him. This is how Werner saves Marie’s life.

They talk for a short while about each other’s lives and how Werner used to listen to Marie’s grandfather’s voice, but their encounter soon comes to an end. Werner fantasizes about what they could’ve done if there wasn’t a war. He thinks, “…they could leave the house and walk to a tourists’ restaurant and order a simple meal and eat in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share” (306). This line initially irked me because I don’t get why Werner imagines them as lovers when he has just met Marie, but it still makes me sentimental. When they must leave, Werner helps Marie escape with the other civilians. She gives Werner the key to the grotto, and Marie places the model house with the Sea of Flames inside the grotto, but we do not know what happens to the stone.

Marie gets part of her happy ending. The Americans come to liberate Saint-Malo, and Etienne is released from prison. They are reunited, but she is still looking for her father.

Werner dies, and I don’t understand why. He is taken prisoner by the Americans although he is treated well. He gets a high fever, and he walks out of the hospital tent at night into a field of land mines planted by his own people. He then “disappears in a fountain of earth” (314). I honestly don’t understand why Werner dies. He would have been able to return to Germany soon and reunited with Jutta. It’s so frustrating that he died so suddenly. Of course, I don’t know if his sickness would’ve killed him eventually. However, I do not understand why he would walk into a field of land mines.

This blog may be a school assignment, but it feels therapeutic to write all my thoughts out. I usually like to discuss what I read or watch with others to share the pain but writing it out makes me feel a lot better. It’s just so unsatisfying for Werner and Marie-Laure to only have spent a few hours together. The book summary hyped it up so much that I thought they would fall in love and grow old together or at least hang out for quite a while. I’m going to go to bed and be sad about this beautiful story.

We see everything coming together in Part 9. Marie-Laure, Werner, and Von Rumpel are all in Saint-Malo, and we get closer to the bombings.

Werner tracks down Etienne’s broadcasts and finds the antenna at his house. However, Werner does not report his findings to anyone because he recognizes the broadcast voice as the science-savvy Frenchman who he used to listen to. When he locates the house, he sees Marie exit and decides to follow her. He observes that “She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog” (269). This line is so poetic and beautiful. Werner continues to think about the young Austrian girl who was killed, and Marie “takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night” (276). This heart-wrenching line really highlights the mental toll that the war takes on Werner and other soldiers.

Marie faces great conflict. She is optimistic that the American troops are approaching, but the Germans occupying Saint-Malo continue to worsen their treatment of the French. When Marie goes to the secret cavern, Von Rumpel follows her and confronts her about the Sea of Flames. After Marie has been gone for too long, Etienne goes outside for the first time in 24 years to look for her. Unfortunately, he is later arrested as all men aged 16 to 60 are taken away by the Germans. Meanwhile, Marie finds the Sea of Flames that her dad hid in the mini city model.

I really enjoyed this part because it felt very action-packed compared to earlier parts of the book. There’s so much tension and many unresolved conflicts. Marie is now all alone as her father, Madame Manec, and Etienne are all gone. It seems like the Sea of Flames’ curse is real. Marie has the stone, and she is safe, while everyone around her is dead or gone. I really hope that Marie will reunite with her father and Etienne although I worry a lot that one or both of them will die.

Werner’s new disobedience confuses me a little bit. It doesn’t seem fair that he tracks down all the other broadcasters and gets them killed, but he spares Marie and Etienne. I mean, I understand that he is shaken after he accidentally got the little girl and her mother killed. I think that’s the main reason why although the other major reason is that Etienne broadcasts the Frenchman who Werner and Jutta used to adore listening to. I’m not complaining about this; of course, nothing is ever fair in the war. However, it just seems odd to me that Werner has decided to stop being loyal to the army.

I anticipate that the bombing will begin soon after the ending to this part. I just want a good ending for Werner and Marie, but I’m not very optimistic.

As the bombings in Saint-Malo continue, Marie-Laure and Werner remain trapped. This short part consists of a lot of self-reflection.

Marie hides in the attic while von Rumpel trudges through the house searching for the Sea of Flames. Marie hears her father’s voice in her head as she struggles to suppress the urge to eat, but she eventually opens the can of beans and sneaks downstairs to drink water undetected. Since Von Rumpel has cancer, he continues his desperate search for the stone because he believes he can obtain its healing powers. As she waits out Von Rumpel’s search, Marie reads her braille book and broadcasts through the radio.

In the basement of the Hotel of Bees, Werner and Volkheimer are trapped. They are hungry and thirsty and reminisce about old times. Werner thinks about how Jutta was the only rational person in his life who opposed the regime. He thinks, “How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?” (255). As Werner longs to be back with his sister and the others at the orphanage, he hears Marie’s voice on the radio.

Werner and Volkheimer pondering their pasts made me feel immense pity for them. They are in a war they do not really want to be in, trapped and dying as the city is destroyed. I think Doerr is very good at highlighting the negative aspects of war. He emphasizes the death and destruction that occur, and he highlights how war corrupts people’s moral centers.

I feel like von Rumpel searching for the Sea of Flames has dragged on too long. I anticipate the moment when he finds out that Marie is in the house or the moment that Marie escapes. I look forward to seeing Marie and Werner escaping their situations. I know that they will eventually meet, and I can feel that moment approaching.

 

I’ll admit that I was slightly bored reading this before, but now I feel like the story is picking up its pace. The cliffhanger we were left with last time is partially resolved as Marie-Laure hides in the false back of the wardrobe while von Rumpel searches her neighborhood model for the Sea of Flames. Von Rumpel has already found the three fakes, so he knows the one Marie-Laure has is real.

We get taken into the war through Werner’s perspective. He is forced to join the army because Schulpforta claims that he faked his age, and he is actually 18. We don’t know if this is true or if the school just wants to get rid of him. In the army, his job is to track down people transmitting radio broadcasts, and they are then killed or taken prisoner. On the other side of the war, Marie-Laure and Etienne work together to transmit radio broadcasts. Marie collects her daily bread with a slip of paper hidden inside, and the numbers written are then broadcasted by Etienne. At the end of Part 7, we find out that Werner is called to track down terrorist broadcasts occurring in Saint-Malo, where we know that Etienne and Marie are illegally broadcasting.

I noticed that love and hate were very powerfully contrasted in this section. Volkheimer, the giant soldier who worked with Werner at Schulpforta, is a soldier who brutally kills many enemies and who treats prisoners horribly. However, he is very protective of Werner and takes care of him. Volkheimer is characterized a man who “eclipses the ruined village, the fields, the rising sun” (215). We see that Volkheimer has a compassionate component to his personality, but the war has corrupted him so that his animalistic side is brought out.

Von Rumpel is another character who I have conflicting feelings about because although he is the antagonist of the novel, he is a sympathetic character as he longs to spend time with his daughters after the war. His human side is brought out, and it is touching to me that he has a compassionate side that presents a stark contrast to the terror he inflicts.

Lastly, love and hate are contrasted through the display of innocence. There is a scene where Marine dances to music that Etienne broadcasts, and it is a powerful reminder of happiness even in the darkest of times (I couldn’t resist quoting Dumbledore). Another instance is when Werner observes a little girl playing on the playground in Vienna. This is abruptly contrasted with the death of the girl and her mother who are killed after Werner suspects there is a radio broadcasting in their apartment. This moment left a pang in my chest, and I am again amazed by Doerr’s heart wrenching writing.

A bubble of depression surrounds me after I read this section. Stay tuned to see why.

In Part 4, we learn that Werner and two others are trapped in the basement of the Hotel of Bees because the bombs have collapsed the entire building. Meanwhile, von Rumpel, the greedy German soldier, is sick and continues to search for the Sea of Flames because he believes it may cure him. Part 4 ends on a cliffhanger with von Rumpel entering Etienne and Marie’s apartment.

Part 5 details a great tragedy that pains me to write about. Werner’s only friend at his school Schulpforta is Frederick, a small boy with poor vision and an obsession with birds. I instantly fell in love with him, and I bet that many other readers’ favorite character is also he (Wow, I’m using formal English grammar, and it feels so weird). He is severely bullied at school, and one day, Werner cannot find Frederick. Werner does not know exactly what has happened, but he knows that Frederick has been severely beaten by other boys. A year later, Werner goes to visit Frederick in Berlin, and he finds Frederick in a vegetative state, and he does not remember Werner. This beautiful boy’s tragedy is the reason for my current grief.

In Saint-Malo, Madame Manec takes Marie on walks outside as Marie’s father rots in German prison. Madame Manec organizes a secret old ladies’ resistance club against the Germans, but they don’t really do anything, and Etienne refuses to help because of his fear of the something bad happening to him. Later on, Madame Manec becomes sick and dies.

In countless books I’ve read, the small, innocent boy or girl dies because the author just wants to provoke the reader’s emotions. Doerr did a phenomenal job at making me feel sorrow after Frederick basically died. He didn’t actually die, but his brain and muscles no longer properly function. When Werner visits him, he says that “Frederick’s gaze remains stuck in some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look” (197). I felt emotional pain reading this, and the cruelty of the boys who destroyed Frederick is inconceivable to me.

The cliffhanger from Part 4 is bothering me right now, and I hope von Rumpel dies before he can get to the Sea of Flames, which Marie has. I’m nervous to see what will go down when he searches the apartment.

In Part 2, we go back to Saint-Malo where catastrophic bombings terrorize the city. Part 3 details Marie’s arrival in Saint-Malo and Werner’s schooling. At 14 years old, Werner passes challenging tests and is admitted to an elite Nazi boarding school. Jutta is upset that Werner is leaving, and she provides an outside perspective as she believes that the Germans are the bad people in the war due to the foreign broadcasts she has heard. When Werner says that they can live a happy life together after he graduates, Jutta says, “Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me” (93). I can relate to Jutta’s perspective as she recognizes that she cannot believe only what she is told. When Werner goes to the school, he builds an advanced motor and is hired by a professor to do complex calculations in the lab. It makes me really sad that this school with amazing infrastructure and resources is being used to train boys for the Nazi party. If Werner had been born later, he likely would’ve had a better use for his technical skills.

Meanwhile, Marie and her father escape on foot and by truck for three days to Saint-Malo, where they stay at her great-uncle Etienne’s house. Etienne has PTSD from WWI, but Marie bonds with him and tries to calm him down during his panic attacks. Her dad makes her stay inside, but he builds a model of the neighborhood for her to feel. A neighbor reports him for suspicious activity, and Marie’s dad is arrested on his way to visit Paris. I felt a huge sense of dread upon reading this ending to Part 3, and I can feel this book tugging at my heartstrings already.

The Sea of Flames, a precious gemstone, belongs to the museum in Paris, but there are three decoys and one real stone given to four different people. Marie’s dad has one of them although he does not know which. I feel like the author’s message with the stone is very powerful because men will go to extreme lengths to get their hands on wealth. The Sea of Flames presumably symbolizes avarice. This sin will probably bring about a major downfall in others’ lives as we continue through the book. I’m eager to find out if the stone Marie’s dad possesses is the real Sea of Flames. The suspense is really building with his arrest and the Germans seeking the stone for its unconceivable value. I’m afraid that Marie’s dad will be killed, but I refuse to look up the ending because I hate spoilers.

Part 1 gives us insight into the childhoods of the two protagonists. Marie became blind when she was six due to preexisting conditions. She struggles greatly initially, but she is eventually able to find her way back to her apartment from a location in her neighborhood that her dad takes her to. Marie is such an inspirational character, and I can relate to her excitement every time she gets a new braille book to read as I had a similar insatiable desire for books when I was younger. Unfortunately, as the Germans approach, Marie and her father are forced to flee Paris, and they set on foot to another city.

On the other side of the border, Werner grows up with his sister, Jutta, in an orphanage. Werner is unarguably a genius. He builds a radio using scraps that he can find in the orphanage and creates other incredibly useful inventions. Because of his skills, he becomes the neighborhood radio repairman. One night, he is summoned by a colonel to repair an extremely expensive radio, and of course he succeeds. His accomplishments juxtapose the sense of dread I feel as Werner approaches his 15^th birthday and must work in the mines. We know that he later works for the military as a tech expert. However, will he have to go to the mines before that?

Antisemitism begins to rear its ugly head with the rise of the Nazi party. At the orphanage, the children watch a play in which “the invaders pose as hook-nosed department-store owners, crooked jewelers, dishonorable bankers: they sell glittering trash…” (33). This disturbing play that imbrutes Jews makes me feel sick as I expect much worse later. The topic of antisemitism reminds me of a podcast that I listened to today, in which the host talked about a recent CNN poll that revealed how 1 in 20 Europeans have never heard of the Holocaust, and 10% of Europeans have an unfavorable view of Jews, with 19% of Hungarians holding an unfavorable view. I think these troubling survey results were important to share because antisemitism still has a long way to go after World War II. I anticipate that I will be much more disturbed later on in the novel as the prejudice and brutality worsen. Doerr effectively builds the suspense in the wake of the impending invasion of Paris, and I look forward to reading about Marie’s escape to Saint-Malo and Werner’s military tech training.

 

Things are not looking good. We are introduced to a very dark setting, of course, as this is a World War II novel, and we can’t have happy things in life. In the city of Saint-Malo, sixteen-year-old French girl Marie-Laure Leblanc is blind, and instead of running to the cellar during a German bombing, she chooses to touch an extremely intricate replica of her neighborhood. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old German boy Werner Pfennig uses a radio to communicate with the Austrian soldiers upstairs as he sits in the lobby of the Hotel of Bees. I found this name very funny, and the backstory is that the hotel used to be the home of a wealthy man who quit his job to study bees.

Going back to Marie, imagining the scene of her tracing the patterns of the miniature replica while bombs are being dropped nearby breaks my heart. It’s so powerful to me that Marie is focusing her attention on the city she (presumably) loves while it’s being destroyed right outside her window. Also, why is she alone? No one is there yelling at her to get in the shelter, so it seems like she has to fend for herself. I can’t imagine the courage it takes to take care of oneself at such a young age when BLIND. I love Marie’s character already. Something else that I assume is significant happens, but we are left in the dark. Here’s what the book says, “A stone drops into her palm. It’s cold. The size of a pigeon’s egg. The shape of a teardrop… ‘Papa?’ she whispers.” The stone has something to do with her dad, and I bet this mystery will clear up for us very soon. I wonder if Marie’s father was captured by the Germans; it seems plausible.

Can we talk about how poetic this novel is? The writing is so beautiful and conjures up vivid imagery in my head. The last sentence of part zero is, “In the cellar beneath the Hotel of Bees, the single bulb in the ceiling winks out.” I could never imagine the image of a light bulb going out stirring up so much emotion in me. It fills me with a little dread, but I feel overall sadness for the people living through the war who have to deal with power outages and so much worse. This is a great start to the novel, and I’m very excited to get to know Marie and Werner better.