The Book Thief Review by Emma

Recently, I read the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, a historical fiction focused around a young girl growing up in Germany between 1939 and 1943. The book follows a young girl named Liesel Meminger as she arrives in the small fictional town of Molching, Germany and comes of age under of the Nazi regime. The book begins with a brief introduction in which the unnamed narrator (more on them later) introduces themselves and highlights the three moments in which they met Liesel: after the death of her younger brother, later in her childhood, and after her hometown is bombed. After this introduction, the story backs up to the same scene in which the narrator first meets Liesel as she and her mother journey to her new foster family, the Hubermanns. On the train ride there, her younger brother dies suddenly, and she arrives alone and completely devastated. Over the next year, she bonds with her fierce, but loving foster mother, Rosa, and her kind, gentle foster father, Hans and befriends a lively troublemaker named Rudy who lives on her street. At first, she struggles in school and frequently has nightmares about her brother’s death, but she gradually settles in to her new life with the Hubermanns. She soon learns to read, and this helps empower her, make her more comfortable, and begin her fascination with books and words. Everything is going pretty smoothly, until one night, a Jewish man named Max Vanderburg, the son of a man who saved Hans’ life, shows up at their door one night asking for protection. The Hubermanns agree to hide him in their basement, and time passes, he and Liesel gradually become friends. (It’s hard to know where to stop for spoilers, given that the narrator often makes a point to remove the element of uncertainty about the story’s future by referencing or giving away later events, but I would say this is the most logical place to stop.) The rest of the story spans the next couple of years as Liesel continues to mature and make friends, as World War II continues, and as the family’s situation hiding Max becomes more and more perilous, and leads up to the final scene referenced in the intro, in which Liesel is alone during the aftermath of a bombing. Overall, I have to say that The Book Thief is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s incredibly well-written, has a discinct voice and writing style that makes it interesting, utilizes fascinnating, unorthodox descriptive language, and is funny, emotional, and heartwarming while still presenting some really interesting themes. Furthermore, although Liesel and the other main protaganists are primarily pretty young (Liesel is almost ten at the beginning of the book and fourteen at the end, not including the epilouge) I’d consider this a good book both for teenagers and adults in terms of writing style and difficulty, content, and themes.

One thing about The Book Thief that really makes it stand out it the narration style. It seems I’ve been talking about how the narration style of almost every book I’ve blogged about, but the narration in The Book Thief is both really special and interesting and is, I would argue, a defining feature of the story. The narrator, while unnamed, is effectively a personification of death, whether this is simply Death itself, an angel of death, or the Grim Reaper. The primary premise of the book is that Death finds Liesel’s writings about her life when she leaves them behind at the sight of the bombing and decides to tell her story as a testament to the good and evil in humanity. This results in a story that’s primarily told through Liesel’s eyes in the third person, but is told in the voice of Death, and includes they commentary, interjections, and occasional accounts of what they were during World War II while the story takes place. This does a lot for the story, but particularly makes it really interesting to read, highlights the persistent theme of death and mortality in the story, and allows the narrator to “break the fourth wall” and communicate their thoughts directly to the reader. This narration also sets the tone of the story. Obviously, it’s somewhat dark, but it’s also contemplative, as Death considers and wonders about human nature. They also seem a little bit in scorn of the whole situation, since they seem to take the viewpoint that everyone will eventually die, so in some ways, it’s useless for us to try to make our mark on the world anyway, and this gives the story an almost sarcastic tone at times.

The other aspect of The Book Thief that stood out to me was the characters. All of the characters in the book, from important characters like Liesel, Max and the Hubermanns to minor ones such as the leader of a group of thieves in which Rudy and Liesel briefly participate, Liesel’s neighbor, and Rudy’s Hitler Youth leader were really well-developed, and felt truly realistic and three-dimensional. In addition, the author did an incredible job making the main characters likable, despite their obvious faults. Any reader will surely want to root for characters like Liesel, Rudy, Max, and the Hubermanns, and that makes the deaths of many of them even more emotional and heartbreaking, even though they’re revealed from the beginning of the book.

Overall, I couldn’t recommend The Book Thief enough. It’s truly an incredibly well-written, unique story, and I would recommend to any teenage or adult reader.