The first thing I absolutely loved about this book was the prose. The words are beautiful, the imagery is vivid, and the atmosphere created by the writing is tangible. The next is the characterization; both Marie-Laure and Werner felt like real people to me, and the same goes for many other characters, such as Etienne or Jutta.

Where the book suffered a little for me was the story, or rather, the way it was constructed/presented. The combination of different timelines, different POVs, and very short chapters created a feeling that this wasn't a unified story, but rather simply a series of snapshots from different sides of the war, each of them wonderfully written, each of them painting a haunting picture of the way something so enormous and cruel and unfair affects a person. If the entire book was written that way, I would actually enjoy it for what it would be then. But there is a point where the author tries to pull all the storylines together and focus on the plot, and for me, the way that part turned out to be was, to be honest, unsatisfying. The depth of the character-focused scenes gave way to some very shallow plotting, with events that felt rushed and questions remaining unanswered.

That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the book, inasmuch as I can honestly apply the word 'enjoy' to a war story. I loved big parts of it. It gave me a lot of feelings and a nightmare, and I've written down so many quotes to re-read later. But I just feel that if all those storylines continued to exist alongside each other without intersecting in any sort of "plotty" ways, the way they have been for most of the novel, the impact would be even stronger.