The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

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The Book Thief is about a little girl, Liesel Meminger, and her life through World War II and the Holocaust. Liesel, as far as we know, is not a Jew, but her family is accused of having Communist ties. Her mother took measures into her own and ran with Liesel and Liesel's little brother. Liesel's little brother contracted an illness and died on the way to Molching, a town not far from Munich. There, in Molching, Liesel is given over to a new family and left.


The little girl, now haunted with nightmares of her brother, is shoved into school where she struggled because she cannot read. She had to cope with a new family, new friends, and new enemies. What she didn't know, since she was only a little girl, was that her list of enemies was going to grow from a few schoolyard bullies to Adolf Hitler and his armies.


She also didn't know the kind of trouble she was going to attract. She becomes a book thief, a Jew harborer, a "Jew Lover", and so much more. Liesel was the epitome of Adolf's nightmare (a free thinking, individual, unstoppable person). But will Liesel escape the ravages of war, or will Death (the narrator of her story) finally catch up to her?


I, personally, am not a fan of this book. The author, Markus Zusak, gave too much away for me to really enjoy it. I like books that keep me in suspense. This book didn't. It told you everything significant that was going to happen before you ever discovered it on your own.


Now, there were good points to this book. The writing style, besides his lack of suspense, was very interesting. He really took a child-like manner in describing the weather and the events that happened. It made the world seem both magical and frightening at the same time. Zusak also created some amazing ideas about Death. Some of them are far-fetched, but at least he tried something new.


The characters are okay. None of them really stood out to me. I had some problems remembering that Liesel was a young girl. I kept thinking she was in her upper teens, which she most definitely is not. You learned too much about each character to really need to get to know them. You have no desire to want to see them more if you already know everything about them.




My rating is:

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