Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have only read half of this book but I hasten to post this review because so many people have embraced it with raves. Doerr is a real master of beautiful prose but many of his details are off. When I notice details that I know don't work from personal experience, I feel I cannot trust an author on details that I don't know. For instance, in France, in 1940, peaches preserved at home would have been kept in glass jars, not cans. There was no air-conditioning in Paris in 1969, so I doubt it existed in St. Malo in 1940. The manuscript is studded with mistakes like this that somehow slipped past the editor. My angst increased when Doerr has his heroine and her father walk to Gare Saint-Lazare in May 1940. We are talking several arrondissements away, across the Seine, through a maze of streets that are not easy to navigate even today. After waiting hours for a train that doesn’t come, the pair sets off at dawn, on foot, destination Evreux. They finally sleep in a hayfield outside Versailles. Forget about crossing the Seine – the main bridge was being rebuilt in 1940 – and climbing the hill of St. Cloud. I want to believe. I really do. But this simply is not plausible. Doerr’s claim that bombs were falling behind them, presumably on Paris, made me start hyperventilating. The French government fled to Bordeaux on June 13, 1940. Paris was not bombed, ever. So, that is my first issue: erroneous details. My second is the storyline which keeps jumping around. I felt confused by this technique and would have preferred to read in sequence. I found myself losing interest in the second thread, the one about the boy in Germany, and only reading every other chapter, about the blind girl. Then we have the introduction of a fabulous diamond that is smuggled out of Jardin des Plantes, and for me the story exited historical fiction and entered fantasy.