This is an odd little story of a blind French girl and a German orphan boy whose connection is tenuous at best. It begins in the years leading up to World War II. Marie-Laure's father is the locksmith at the Natural History Museum in Paris and she grows up haunting its corridors and laboratories. Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutta, grow up in an orphanage in the mining district of northern Germany.
It is also a story of obsession and the madness on many levels. Individual madness playing against the institutional madness of the Third Reich.
The threads of the lives of these two young people cross and re-cross delicately. I was beginning to fear that they would never actually meet, but they do - for a day in the midst of the seige of Saint-Malo. Then the threads float again, crossing in the lives of the people close to both of them.
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