With so much attention given to the artistry of his prose, Doerr’s story fades into little more than static.
All the Light We Cannot See · Anthony Doerr
Scribner, 2014 · 530 pages, hardcover
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Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with many an accolade for his stylistic prose. Verbs find themselves severed from their subjects and sentences end up two nouns long. With little variation in tone throughout the novel, Doerr writes with a pen tuned to the limited frequencies of drama and melodrama. It works, but only half the time.
The Masthead 