I have read quite a few books set during WWII, and it is only rarely that a book takes the perspective of children who grow up during the war. Not only that, but these children were not Jewish or part of any other persecuted group. One of the children is Werner, a young, bright German boy who is privileged to attend an elite training school. The other is Marie Laure, a blind French girl who survives the occupation and even participates in a little resistance activity. For the entire story, these two are on course toward each other, slowly but surely, and when they meet, each is prepared to help each other with what they need the most. I love the theme of choices and where they lead, and the reminder that the cost of war is always greater than it is possible to anticipate. I loved the lyrical language, especially the descriptions of how Marie-Laure perceives the world. 
 To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lillies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurriane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth's crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks. 
 Frederick said we don't have choices, don't own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet - I will not - Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.