How to write a heart-breaking novel

Anthony Doerr should have followed up his magnum opus, All The Light We Cannot See, with a how-to guide. How to create cinematic characters whose fates the reader is profoundly invested in. How to write yet another WWII novel but do it with such patience and imbue it with magic. How to structure a novel so that it's like a spiral, moving seamlessly between past and present in an ever narrowing gyre. How to pay off the reader's patience with devastating poignancy.

Indeed, this is a novel for your reader reader. I would not recommend it to a student who doesn't find pleasure in language and the act of reading. Doerr is a beautiful writer and writes in the mode of a realist (though elements of magical realism are woven in too). For a plot driven, action-focused writer he is also poetic and his writing rich in imagery. Doerr's descriptions of smell and sound, as he renders the experience of blind Marie-Laure, are the work of a master: "Deep in Madame's voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagos and lagoons and fjords". One almost wishes one were blind simply to hear atolls in people's voices.

At times the novel treads a precipice between brilliant literature and overweening adjectival tedium, however the very short chapters perhaps rescue Doerr from falling off this precipice.

A solid 4 star book guaranteed to unravel the most hard-hearted reader.