Perhaps you've read it; after all, it's been on the best seller lists for nearly two years:  All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  The plaudits this novel has received are numerous and include a Pulitzer Prize.  Critic upon critic has praised it, and many a reader has found it to be one of the best books she has read in years.

     With good reason.  Set in World II Europe, All the Light tells a marvelously constructed story, rich with history, literary allusion, creative word choices, and a clever plot.  All the Light relates the story of two young people, one an inquisitive blind girl living in France, the other a bright and socially ostracized boy in Germany.  Over the passage of some years and several intricate twists of story, the two young people meet each other.  There is no romance, but there is an incredible bond.  It's a mutual understanding that in the midst of a horrific military conflict two people from opposite sides realize that, ironically, they really do need each other to survive.

     One survives; the other does not.  Though I won't say which one lives, I will say that, bigger picture, the novel demonstrates, at once, the incredible compassion as well as the frightening futility of humanness.  The need to care and look out for one's fellow human being is matched, perhaps overrode, by the realization that, in the end, life continues on, anyway.

     Quite.  In a world without larger definition, meaning still remains elusive.