Young People in Wartime 
 This may be the best Young Adult book about the Second World War I have ever read; the only problem is that I don't think it was intended as one. But still, it has great strengths. It is the story of two young people, a German orphan boy and a motherless French girl, who come into their teens during the War, until fate throws them into each other's way at a moment of extreme peril. 
 Both characters are utterly sympathetic. Marie-Laure Le Blanc is the daughter of the locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and escapes with him to the walled coastal city of Saint-Malo when the Germans invade. Blind from the age of six, she has learned to rely on her other senses to survive in an increasingly dangerous world. Werner Pfennig grows up in an orphanage in the Ruhr, destined to be sent at 15 down the same mine that killed his father. But he develops an uncanny ability to build and repair radios which earns him a place at a Nazi military school, with all the bullying and indoctrination which that implies. 
 Doerr has chosen his title with care. One of the first things that Werner hears on his home-made radio is a Frenchman broadcasting about light; this will turn out to have been Marie-Laure's grandfather. Light shines throughout the book in contrast to the encroaching darkness, not least in some luminous writing. But of course it is light that the girl cannot see, and the boy is raised in another kind of darkness. So sound becomes the principal medium, with radio as its carrier. The mental liberation of those first broadcasts is replaced by propaganda, as radios picking up non-German stations are forbidden. The transmitter that had broadcast the science lectures from Saint-Malo will later be used to send messages for the Resistance, and Werner's Wehrmacht unit is sent to track it down. [These are not spoilers, because the story alternates sections set in 1944 with those from the preceding ten years, and we are introduced to the players in the endgame very early on--though not, of course, told how exactly it will end.] 
 All the same, this is one of the qualities that make me call this a Young Adult novel, the fact that it is set up so clearly, and we are just waiting for the pieces to come together. Add to this protagonists who are scarcely more than children, a rather fanciful subplot involving a precious diamond with a curse on it, and a story told in very short chapters with catchy titles and easy to read, and you get something that would be pretty well perfect for a teenager, much like Marie-Laure's favorite author, Jules Verne. Against this, you have the book's length (530 pages), the fact that the adventure-story quality of the first half changes to some real death and horror towards the end, and the author's decision to extend the story to 1974 and then 2014 in a decidedly adult way. So an odd mixture that doesn't quite come off. Make no mistake, I loved the book and raced eagerly towards the end. But I also felt it was too pretty, too carefully wrought, too easy, for the terrible times it claimed to represent.