I was amazed at this author's ability to capture so much detail with such few words (he wrote collections of short stories before this novel). I found the chapters written in Marie Laure's point of view so compelling because we could only "see" what she could (she was blind) and Doerr managed to create such a vivid portrait of her world without describing the way anything looked. I have read several WWII fictions now and I found Marie's and Werner's story original and compelling and true to what I would expect from my understanding of WWII. Each chapter in this book read like a short story and each was wonderfully written, from the details of the world around the characters to the emotional connections between them all. I'll admit I cried a few times with this book. It was very well written.