I was very late in coming to this book, which already has more than 220,000 ratings on Amazon! As I’m sure you’re well aware, it’s an extraordinary novel, a work of art. Author Doerr paints and sculpts with words, creating unforgettable scenes with metaphors and similes that are often startling in the way they leap off the page. I sometimes felt I was in the presence of a word-magician, wondering, “How did he do that? How did he find those words for that event?”

The narrative follows the adventures of a blind teenage girl in Nazi-occupied France, whose museum-employed father has been entrusted to protect a large diamond, the Sea of Flames, from the invading German troops. He refuses to believe the legend of the stone’s curse: that it will provide its bearer with eternal life while all those associated with him will suffer terrible tragedy.

A parallel story is that of German adolescent Werner Pfennig, gifted with a genius for understanding and building radios, and conscripted into service to find those in the French resistance sending forbidden codes to the advancing American army.

The reader is challenged time and again by contradiction, as the author writes about the horrors of war in piercingly beautiful prose. Not only that, but the writer goes on to describe, in understated but heart-breaking terms, the posttraumatic stress coiled like a parasite in the minds of survivors for the rest of their lives.

Ultimately, the novel becomes a testament to human folly and the willful ignorance of world leaders and nations who believe that human problems can be solved on the battlefield.

Given the current state of affairs, I fear we may beat the tribal drums yet again and march our children off to fight another war with “the enemy”: other children whose mothers also nursed them and loved them and loosed them on the world.

Unfortunately, the old folk song still rings true: “Where have all the flowers gone?”