Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.ĭoerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved-for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish-for blue eyes.
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. "This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers.
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