My fiction professor asked us last week if we have read any books that wrecked us. Everybody raised their hands. The first two books that came to mind were The Book Thief and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Now I can add two others to those books: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and The Book of Secrets by Elizabeth Joy Arnold.

Of course, I don’t mean that they completely destroyed me. What I, and my professor, mean is that I felt sad, moved, and most of all, changed in some little way.

All the Light We Cannot See follows Marie-Laure, a French blind girl, and Werner, a German orphan, before and after WWII. It often seems like there are too many WWII/Holocaust books. And to be honest, when I first picked it up, I thought it was going to be yet another casting of that horrible time period.

But it isn’t. It isn’t a typical war book because it actually follows the life of one who became a Nazi because he didn’t have much choice and also because it speaks at length about what happened afterwards to each character and how the war affected them.

It wrecked me because: Its brutal honesty. Its realism. Its simple and beautiful language. And because it showed how much human beings impact each other for better and worse.

The Book of Secrets begins when Chloe Sinclair, after twenty years of marriage, comes home to find that her husband, Nate, is gone. As Chloe tries to figure out what has happened and what is troubling her husband, she revisits her memories of meeting and growing up with her husband and his family.

Throughout the book, Arnold alludes to a plethora of books in telling how Chloe and the Sinclairs grew up and coped with the difficulties of life and each section is named after a book, not necessarily because that particular book is featured in that section, but because of themes and ideas that they share with each section.

It is difficult to say what wrecked me without giving up any specific plot details. It wasn’t the language because while it flowed and was beautiful, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Instead, it was the realistic, albeit tragic events that were relayed. It was the feeling that everything could have happened in reality.