The Book Thief: Different & Astounding

I finished this book, The Book Thief, earlier this year before I created The Bookshelf. It is, so far, the best book that I have read this year.

Different. This book is certainly different. The narrator is Death. Yes, I said Death, as in the opposite of life. Death starts the book by telling about how he (or she? it?) sees the majority of humans, how he thinks they're selfish monsters. Then Death goes on to talk about the one person that narrowly escaped his wrath, multiple times throughout her life. This one person was Liesel Meminger.

Liesel's story starts when she was eleven years old, and was traveling with her mother and younger brother. They are Germans, and it is World War II time. Liesel's mother is sending her two children into foster care, because she is unable to care for them during this difficult time. While on their way to the foster home, Liesel's brother abruptly dies. Mortified, Liesel watches as her little brother is quickly buried in an unknown setting. Before Liesel travels the rest of the way to her new home, she finds a book left behind by the gravedigger. When no one is looking, she steals the book. And thus begins her life as a book thief.

The story continues to tell the next four years of Liesel's life. She learns to read with the help of her kind foster father. She comes to love her new tough-love foster mother. She makes friends with a neighbor down the street. And she quickly befriends a Jew that her family hides in their basement. And, of course, she continues to steal books. This is extremely dangerous, but these books are what get her through the troubling times.

Astounding. This 600-paged book has received numerous awards and hundreds of accolades. Markus Zusak uses unique, lyrical writing to tell this story. This book is written like no other. I knew the end of the book, by the middle of the book. This is not because it was a predictable book, this book was extremely unpredictable. I knew the ending, because the narrator, Death, told me about it. Death, and I quote, doesn't enjoy surprises. Death, at least in this book, is like that. He has a surprisingly strange sense of humor, and can be very blunt. Even knowing the ending, I was still shocked when I got to the end of the book.

Not many authors can do that.

Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars