Upcoming Books:
February 19
All That is Solid Melts into Air by Darragh McKeon
March 29
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

"By the time the narrative finds Marie-Laure and Werner in the same German-occupied village in Brittany, a reader’s skepticism has been absolutely flattened by this novel’s ability to show that the improbable doesn’t just occur, it is the grace that allows us to survive the probable." All The Light We Cannot See by John Freeman, Globe Correspondent, May 3, 2014 The Boston Globe Books

Author Bio:

Anthony Doerr hails from Cleveland, Ohio. He has written two short story collections, The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010), a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome (2007), and two novels, About Grace (2004) and All The Light We Cannot See (2014). All The Light We Cannot See was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and The New York Times named it a notable book for 2014. 

Doerr studied history and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1995 and went on Bowling Green State University to earn an MFA. He currently writes a science book column for the Boston Globe. 

He moved to Boise Idaho where he lives with his wife and twin sons.
Author Quotes: "Writing the book was a huge puzzle. I felt like I was building a big model house. I had, I think, 187 chapters, and each one alternates in point of view or time.

Occasionally, I worried I'd be too vested into the symmetry of Marie/Werner, Marie/Werner, and there are times when more is happening in one life than the other. So eventually, I had to give myself permission to break that symmetry, that A-B-A-B back-and-forth oscillation. I had color-coded notecards, where I coded them by which point of view the reader would be in and laying them out, always shuffling them." -Anthony Doerr, Powells.com interview with Jill Owens, April 23, 2014
Read BExtraordinaire Blog for more reviews on our next book club selection. 
is reading "All the Light We Cannot See"  written by Anthony Doerr on January 29. 

2014 National Book Award finalist, All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr tells the story of two children, one German and other French, whose lives intersect during World War II. In 1944, near the town of Saint-Malo on the northern French coast, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, blind, fearless and French, fatefully encounters Werner Pfennig, a German orphan with a mechanical knack for radios, when he is sent to seek out and destroy enemy radios. A third character, a Nazi officer named Sergeant Major von Rumpel balances out the tale.

The book alternates between each character's story told against the backdrop of the war. Werner becomes a member of Hitler's Youth to escape the life of a miner. At the time, Hitler believed the future of Nazi Germany was dependent upon its youth. Children were taught, "The weak must be chiselled away. I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel." Werner is no exception. 

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the daughter of a widowed locksmith for the Museum of Natural History in Paris. When Marie-Laure goes blind at the age of six, her father creates a miniature model city to teach Marie-Laure the neighborhood streets to help her navigate on her own. These miniatures contained puzzles and play an important role in Marie-Laure's survival. 

Von Rumpel is searching for a missing gem from the Museum of Natural History. The Sea of Flames is a rare and massive 133 carat pear-cut diamond, blue as the sea with a flare of red at its core. Von Rumpel believes that Marie-Laure's father has stolen it. 

Doerr weaves the children's stories together with science, technology and light.