Megan Rowe’s Reviews > All the Light We Cannot See > Status Update

But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it? She closes her fist, walks into her room, and replaces the stone inside the model house. Slides the three roof panels back into place. Twists the chimney ninety degrees. Slips the house inside her pocket.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Marie-Laure wakes and thinks she hears the shuffle of Papa's shoes, the clink of his key ring. Fourth floor fifth floor sixth. His fingers brush the doorknob. His body radiates a faint but palpable heat in the chair beside her. His little tools rasp across wood. He smells of glue and Gauloises bleues.
But it is only the house groaning. The sea throwing foam against rocks. Deceits of the mind.

Werner thinks of his childhood, the skeins of coal dust suspended in the air on winter mornings, settling on windowsills, in the children's ears, in their lungs, except down here in this hole, the white dust is the inverse, as if he is trapped in some deep mine that is the same but also the opposite of the one that killed his father.

The following day, the radio stations begin disappearing. The warders in the guards' station whack the side of their wireless and tilt it this way and that, but only static comes out of its speaker. As if each relay antenna were a candle flame and a pair of fingers came along and pinched it out.

The second gift is heavy, wrapped in paper and twine. Inside is a massive spiral-bound book. In Braille.
"They said it's for boys. Or very adventurous girls." She can hear him smiling.
She lies her fingertips across the embossed title page. Around. The. World. In. Eighty. Days. "Papa, it's too expensive."