The Book Thief

I had always heard that The Book Thief by Markus Zusak was a must-read book. The novel has won many awards, including the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults in 2007 and the Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year in 2007. I finally got a chance to read it this last week, and it surpassed my expectations.

It is a hard book to describe, in many ways. The narrator is Death, an entity who is sympathetic to humans despite his reputation for being grim and cold. Against his better judgment, he follows a young girl named Liesel as she lives through World War II in Nazi Germany. The girl's mother sends her to live with a foster family in a town near Munich, where Nazism has grown deep roots. As the Hitler cult reaches a fever peak, the family takes in and hides a Jewish man in their basement. However, this book is not action-oriented - it is more of a character study, with in-depth detailing of the thoughts and feelings of the main character, Liesel, which make her come alive in your mind.

The text is rich with evocative description and vivid emotion. The brief interjections from Death are at times heartbreaking, funny, or enlightening, sometimes all at once. Unlike many other Holocaust books, The Book Thief explores Nazi Germany from the perspective of a regular German family, giving new light to an event tread many times over. At its heart, this is a novel about words - over the course of the novel, Liesel learns to read and write, steals books, and learns the power of words to change the world, for better or worse. This is a book that takes hold of you and does not let go till the very end.