After two people, unrelated to each other, both recommended The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, I decided I ought to give it a go. I’m not sure what I expected. Possibly Fahrenheit 451 meets The Sting, with a little Diary of Anne Frank. And maybe even a touch of Terry Pratchett, considering Death is the narrator.
It really wasn’t any of those. It was the story of Liesel Meminger, a German girl living outside of Munich during World War II. The book opens with her younger brother’s death, and Liesel being passed over to foster parents by her mother. The story follows Liesel’s bonding with her foster family, and with Rudy, a neighbor boy and her best friend. It also follows as she learns to read. She does steal books, but it’s not really the organized crime or defiance of Nazi book-burning that some of the plot summaries of this book suggest. It is about the power of words, though, and how certain books come to define Liesel’s life.
I liked the The Book Thief, but it is an overwhelmingly bleak book. The single word that most comes to mind is grim, especially in the later sections. There are happy moments, sweet moments…maybe even one or two funny ones (though this is emphatically not Terry Pratchett, despite Death narrating). And yet there’s such bleakness. Poverty is set against a backdrop of oppression, with a lot of Heil Hitler-ing for good measure.
I thought of a funny moment–Death reflects at one point that if everybody starts in on “Heil Hitler” in a crowd, it would be really easy to cause injuries from the arm movements, if you happen to be standing in the wrong place. He’s not sure if it’s happened–all he can say for certain is that it’s never killed anyone.
But despite that, it’s a bleak book. If this was a movie, I think it would have to be in black and white. Or else use a trick Tim Burton likes, of making color movies that are gray and washed-out, as though the world is perpetually overcast. Think of Sweeney Todd or Sleepy Hollow.
I enjoyed the characters, especially Liesel’s adoptive father; Rudy, the neighbor boy who becomes her best friend; and Max, the Jewish man who hides in Liesel’s family’s basement. I was also impressed by the portrayal of Liesel’s adoptive mother, who grows a lot as a character. I don’t think it’s that she grows as a person–I think it’s that we see new sides and depths to her as the book progresses, so that even though she started out seeming completely horrible, by the end I was kind of fond of her.
The Book Thief has apparently been classified as Young Adult sometimes and for adults at others. I think it could be YA, but older YA. It’s not so much for any particular moment as for all that bleakness, and some of the darker plot turns. It has “adult themes,” I suppose.
But it is a very good and complex book. Just be careful that you don’t read it when you’re already feeling down about the world!
Author’s site: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/markuszusak/
Tales of the Marvelous 
I recently finished this one. I thought it was really beautiful! And it had me crying as I finished it, driving through East Texas on a road trip. It actually is a movie now, came out this winter? Have you seen it? I can say that it is actually one of the few movies that does a very good job of interpreting the book it’s based on. And all of the characters were just wonderful. If you liked the book, I can definitely recommend the movie.
I’ve seen that book in bookshop but for some reason I end up never buying it. I have a recomendation of a book that read because a friend who like reading recommend it a lot and that it “the eight by Katherine Neville” I ususally got bored with historical book due to lack of historical info but this book actually made me wander on internet in search of the msmissing information in order to undertand it all. Its about a woman who needs to find all the chess pices of a misterious Carlo Magno Chess. She pass through a lot of adventurs and dengerous moments since there are other peolple trying to get all the pieces together. I love it! ^^
Sometimes books that are bleak or grim still have a lot to offer in terms of being thought-provoking. The reader just needs to realize what they are getting into when they start reading the book!
I loved The Book Thief when I started it, but then, I’m not quite sure why, I lost interest. I don’t have that many books that I’ve left unfinished, but this is one of them. The writing is well done and engaging, but somehow the story didn’t propel me forward.