The Book Thief

Reader reviewed by Saba

World War Two is just on the brink of beginning. Chaos is everywhere - and so are Nazis.
Liesel Meminger and her brother are to be transported to another home, for reasons unknown. She is both sad and exhilarated - what is happening?
But her brother dies on the journey, and Lisel finds it hard to face the grief. She and her mother, silent and solemn, conduct a funeral for the little boy outside in the snow.
That is when it catches her eye - "the Gravedigger's Handbook", a lone book lying on the ground. She pockets it, and this is her first act of book thievery.

Life goes on. Her new, foster family, the Hubermanns, enrol her in school, where she finds a friend in the mischievious, lemon-yellow-haired Rudy. But her eye is always on the look out for new books to steal - from Nazi book-burnings, or the Mayor's house's library.

This is a story with a unique and interesting plot. It is a story that shows us the importance of words, and where we would be without them. Narrated by "Death" itself, it captures aspects of life and love, and the power of words.

A must read.

Reader reviewed by Grace

The Book Thief is "just a small story really, about, among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter, and quite a lot of thievery". It tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a girl sent to live with foster parents during World War Two in Nazi Germany. Liesel Meminger is also known as the book thief, and can't resist the urge to take books whenever she gets the chance. But this story is more than just about book stealing. It is about a blonde-haired boy named Rudy and two foster parents who hide a Jew in their basement. It is about human nature, resilience, love, and at the same time, war, death, and chocolate-covered skies.

It will make you laugh and it will make you cry.

Death as a narrator? What an idea! It was so interesting to see the Second World War from a German perspective and find out more about the climate of fear that existed in Nazi Germany - a real eye-opener. At the same time, the book puts you through the emotional ringer big-time. I think this is a story that stays with you long after the last page.

This book is not for everyone. Not by a long shot. It’s not fast-paced (it took me an entire week to get through, which is like 5 years in book-reviewer world). It’s sad. It’s set during one of the darkest periods in human history. It’s narrated by Death. So even though I’m about to give a positive review, you have to consider all of these things before deciding whether this is a book you want to attempt.

That said, this was a wonderful book. It’s very different from most of the YA fiction out there. The writing style almost made me feel like I was floating above the story, or dreaming it. Death views everything happening in Liesel’s life calmly. Death doesn’t make many judgments about what he is witnessing. He is intrigued, and sometimes feels sorry for the people he is observing, but he is mostly detached from the events. It almost gave the book a hazy feel, if that makes any sense.

Also, since Death exists outside of our perceptions of time and space (and since he is Death), he sometimes jumps around in the narrative. A character will have something happen to him, and suddenly Death will interject his own thoughts about that character’s death, sometime later. And then we’ll be back in the present again. Sometimes a death is mentioned briefly early in the book, then explained fully later. Other times, Death merely alludes to the character’s later death, and that’s the last we ever hear of it.

Some people find this off-putting or spoiler-ish. But seriously, everyone dies, someday. And I imagine if I was Death, I’d view people’s actions through the lens of their eventual and inevitable deaths too.

As for the human characters, I never felt like I truly knew or completely understood them, because Death doesn’t fully know or understand them either. But I was able to feel them and sympathize with them. I could see many nuances and facets to each of them, but always with a slight sense of detachment. It’s a hard feeling to put into words. Normally, if I don’t feel fully connected with the characters, I can’t enjoy a book. But the detachment in this book seemed very deliberate, instead of the author just not knowing how to make me feel connected.

As for the plot itself, this isn’t a typical Holocaust book, in that we don’t ever venture into the concentration camps (with the exception of Death’s haunting recollection of carrying souls away from the gas chambers) and the main character is too young to fully understand what is going on around her. Liesel’s main concerns are obtaining food, reading her books, and spending time with her friends and foster parents. The main exception to this is the time spent hiding Max in the basement. But even then, Liesel is more concerned with the stories he tells and the friendship they form. She doesn’t care that he is a Jew, and doesn’t spend much time pondering his fate if he is ever found out.

There’s a bittersweet innocence to her story. She can go to Hitler Youth meetings, attend book burnings, and hide a Jew in her basement, but she is still largely ignorant to the horrors of the world around her. Of course, even a child can’t be oblivious forever, and once the war finally comes directly to Liesel, it is hear- wrenching.

I cried towards the end of this book. I pretty much never cry during books (I think the last time I cried was when I read The Chamber by John Grisham in 1998, and I still can’t really explain that one), but I cried while reading this one. The only thing stopping me from a full-on gulping and hiccuping ugly-cry was the fact that my husband was sleeping in the bed next to me, and I didn’t want to wake him up (plus, I kind of thought that if I did wake him up, he may make fun of me for crying so hard at a book. And I didn’t feel like explaining why it was totally justified).

I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was going to hit me. As I mentioned before, I felt like I had gone through the bulk of the book as a detached observer. I didn’t feel completely connected to the characters, although I didn’t mind. And yet at the end, I could barely even breathe through the tears.

The Book Thief is a story of regular people doing the best they can during a period of unspeakable evil. It’s a story of Death being fascinated by life. And a story of a child being a child, in a world where innocence is a luxury few can afford.

I thought it was beautiful.

Where does one even begin with this book? Nothing I say could ever really do it justice. I guess I understand what all the fuss was about now.

Liesel is now one of my favorite heroines of all time. She's strong-willed, compassionate, and still just a girl. She cries, she makes mistakes, and she lets herself question everything she's ever known. The emotion contained in this one girl is just heartbreaking at times.

I could talk on and on about all the characters, but I'll keep things short and just say this: all the main side characters were wonderfully written and I felt some sort of affection towards them all.

Death is a fantastic narrator. He's a little odd, but really rather likable. I loved the way he cared for the humans and their souls. His storytelling is a bit disjointed, but I grew to like it.

I've never read or seen anything from the point of view of an average German in the times of World War II. It's easy enough to think of them all as one big, bad entity, but of course that's not the case. The majority of them were just normal people trying to continue on with normal lives. It hurts to know that these people could be anyone and that this truly happened to so many people.

The Nutshell: Everything I'd ever heard about the emotions of this book was true. I ended up finishing it at work and was quite the mess for the last hour or so of my day. The story may just be about a girl growing up in World War II Germany, but that's the quiet beauty of it all.

Direct Hit

Amazing how it can be both dark and inspiring at the same time. I didn't know what to think about this book when i first started and it took a while to get into it but I'm glad i did.

Reader reviewed by OY

I thought The Book Thief was going to be just another book.  It turned out to be nothing like expected.
    A girl growing up in Nazi Germany with her foster family develops an obsession with stealing things. Her family and friends are facing the effects of the government and the war.
 The weirdest part about this book was the narrator.
 Rudy brought humor and feeling to the book.
    The best part was the white-out pages of Hitler's Life Story that Max wrote on to make a new version and then Leseil's story.
    When I finished this book I wasn't sure if it was supposed to just be a story or perhaps it was meant to be a huge metaphor.
    But the ending made me teary and it really opened my eyes to the life of  the everyday people living in Germany during the second world war.
I going to remember this book for a long time.

I first read this book for my 8th grade English class, almost four years ago. When I joined Goodread a couple of years ago, I gave the book four stars based on my memories of what I’d read.

Now that I’ve reread it with a more mature and critical mindset, I think four stars still holds true.

Markus Zusak remains, in my mind, one of the most quotable authors I’ve ever read. His style is rich and full of imagery and clever turns of phrase that are beyond fantastic. If I wasn’t afraid that it might be stupid and something I’d later regret, I’d take out a highlighter and go crazy. As is, sticky notes will have to do. Simply put, Zusak writes the way I love, the way I want to write, the way one of my very good writing buddies writes (and I adore her prose because of her imagery and descriptiveness).

For the whole “Death narrates” aspect, I’m not blown away. I think it’s a clever idea, and I think it worked, and was an experiment in writing gone right. But many people seem to think Death’s grim humor and unique tone is what makes the book, and I’d have to disagree. It’s interesting, yes, but that’s not what makes the book special.

And in my opinion, what makes this book worth the second read is the last 70 pages. The Book Thief’s end is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I’ve ever read, probably more so because the reader knows it’s coming from the absolute beginning. The entire thing is an emotional mess. I don’t cry when I read books, and I didn’t cry when I read The Book Thief, but the feeling was there. It’s such a terrific sad-yet-happy resolution. I finished this and seriously sat there like: “Did this all just happen? Did Zusak just pull that off?”

I read Zusak’s other major novel, I Am the Messenger, last year, and I think that in comparison, the writing of The Book Thief is maybe a little less accessible. Death’s narration gives you a certain distance from the characters and plot, and his little sidebar comments can at times be distracting. Some may like that, but I don’t. That’s why, on the whole, I’m not as huge a fan of Zusak’s choice in narrator as the rest of The Book Thief’s dedicated fans.

And while Zusak’s angle on WWII is new—poor German foster girl who steals books—I feel that on the whole, WWII as a topic is very, very tired. I’m not denying that there’s a lot of material to work with, but I can only read so many books about how awful the Nazis were before things get stale. Elie Wiesel’s Night paints the picture clearly enough without additional fictionalized accounts. It’s sort of the way I felt about John Green’s The Fault in our Stars—a great author tackles overdone gimmick.

That being said, the first couple hundred pages of this are very rough, and by rough I mean boring. It’s all typical Nazis attempting to brainwash unsuspecting Germans, some people who see through the brainwashing and are morally superior to hating Jews, hiding a Jew in the basement—the sort of thing anybody would write about in a WWII-era novel.
But like I said, the last 70 pages redeemed a lot of the staleness of this book.

For those willing to brave the dense content and length, The Book Thief is worth your time. Zusak’s writing is excellent, as is the end. I can easily see why this book is so popular, and I think it’s well-deserving of its fame. When I read it when I was fourteen, I remember being pretty ambivalent about it, and I think I still am.

Not one of my absolute favorites, even after a reread and some consideration, but I think it’s a worth while time investment. Zusak certainly can write.

What is there to like?
• It’s a story about the importance of telling and reading stories. Liesel and Max Vandenburg use reading to get themselves through their darker days, Liesel and her foster father read together, Liesel and the mayor’s wife come together through a mutual love of books, Liesel reads to the townspeople as they huddle together during the bomb raids. Perhaps especially important in stories about war and The Holocaust—events which, more than so many other things, call for two of storytelling's most important functions: memory and empathy.
• Rudy Steiner, Rudy Steiner, Rudy Steiner.
Liesel’s best friend and partner in troublemaking, brave boy, full of light. The tragedy of a young boy’s death in war is something easily acknowledged, but the fact of it—robbing him, Liesel, the world of his bright, bright future—wouldn’t hurt so deeply if Rudy weren’t someone to love so completely. Heartbreaking.
• Hans Hubermann, Liesel’s foster father: a kind man who keeps his promises and doesn’t know what to do in the face of the tidal wave of Nazi Germany and the war. Again, heartbreaking as a symbol of the real-life men and women of Germany in the 1930s/40s.
• Not everybody in the town is a nice person, in the normal way that not everyone is nice. This is important to show—war doesn’t care how nice people are.
• Some standout poetic sentences and imaginative descriptions throughout.
• The narration by Death offers the opportunity for some interesting reflections and poignant moments of death in wartime and in peace.

What's not to like?
• Extremely irritating stylistic choice of what other reviewers have called interjections. I might call them interruptions. Whatever they are, they feel extremely gimmicky—except it’s not clear what this gimmick is supposed to accomplish, which makes it all the more puzzling and intrusive.
• It is difficult to care, particularly, about Liesel—this must be the main problem with the book. The narrative is somewhat patchwork, containing many vignettes that occur either during or prior to Liesel’s own timeline, many of which are beautiful or sad or true-seeming. However, Liesel feels like little more than a catalyst for all the interesting things that happen all around her. As the titular character, the book thief should be the one the readers are most invested in, but it seems impossible to get a sense of who she really is—which is thrown into even sharper relief by the captivating personalities of Rudy Steiner, Hans Hubermann, and other townspeople. As a result, the book is missing a heart, which made it difficult for me to love it.

What made me pick it up?
The title; seemingly universal praise; it was continuously on the bestseller list since long before I even paid any attention to bestseller lists.

Other books to try:
The Berlin Boxing Club
Number the Stars
Code Name Verity
Inkheart

Overall recommendation: Recommended.

Reader reviewed by Meg

Okay I'm gonna go crazy here and disagree with all the critics. Unlike (it seems) everyone else in the world, I didn't love this book. I thought that it was very original, being told from the perspective of death, and I definitely felt a connection with the characters, but for some reason the story didn't get me in the heart like other WW2 books have in the past. The book "Maus" which told the story of a holocaust survivor in the graphic novel medium, with mice representing Jews, tugged at my heart much more than the characters in this book. That's right, cartoon mice made me cry. But not "The Book Theif". But maybe I just have a natural affection for mice?