To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.

Years before the start of World War II, a young French girl named Marie-Laure goes blind. With the encouragement and unfailing love of her father, Marie-Laure fights her disability with raw curiosity, and she dedicates herself to learning, exploring the biology of the world around her and reading the works of Jules Verne in Braille. When the war reaches Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee to the coastal town of Saint-Malo, where they take refuge with Marie-Laure’s brilliant, withdrawn uncle. Unbeknownst to Marie-Laure, the pair are also accompanied by a mysterious, potentially cursed gemstone that Marie’s father is trying to keep out of Nazi hands.

Is it right to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

In Germany, Werner and his younger sister Jutta are similarly curious. In their orphanage, Werner mends radios, becoming technologically talented in a way that soon makes him valuable to the Nazi military. When he is recruited, Werner goes willingly, grateful that he will not have to spend his life in his town’s coal mine. Jutta miserably watches her brother go, knowing that the Nazi party will not save him but will merely expose him to a different set of cruelties.

Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.

The paired stories of Marie-Laure and Werner set up a narrative in which the reader feels the pain of the war on both sides; no one is exempt from fear, trauma, or loss. Doerr’s prose swept me off my feet, provoking intensely layered emotions and fascination about the intricacies of the characters’ lives. This novel is quite an undertaking; complex characters and settings require thoughtfulness and dedication on the part of the reader. There were definitely moments in which I wished the pace would pick up, but in retrospect I am thankful to Doerr for pressing me to absorb even the less-momentous events of the story. Doerr writes beautifully, and I felt that he deftly encapsulated the historical time period.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.