You are going to die.
1939 Nazi Germany. The country is holding it's breath. Death has never been busier.
Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
SOME IMORTANT INFORMATION.
This novel is narrated by death.
It's a small story about:
a girl
an accordionist
some fanatical Germans
a Jewish fist fighter
and quite a lot of thievery.
THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak
Genre: Historical Fiction > WWII
Published: 2005
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Stories from the war, both fictional and biographical, exist in abundance, but have you ever read Death's perspective on the tragedy?
Death's narrative is just one unique component of this book. The characters are engaging, real and compassionate. All have a magnetism that I was drawn to, and by the end of the book I felt I knew as friends.
I laughed, I wept, I felt in my gut the collective anger, sadness and fear of the German people watching the Nazis come into power and take away Jewish people without motive, people they had called friends and neighbours.
For children growing up in this time, heads pumped with propaganda, made to witness the besmirchment of an entire race of guiltless people, it must have been even more confusing and distressing.
Liesel is the character whose life Death follows, a young girl whose mother has been taken away as a communist and who's been sent to live with Hans and Rose Hubermann. Her brother died on the journey, and she feels his absence in the empty bed beside hers in her new foster home. Death haunts her, literally and figuratively, drawn to her character, her spirit, and her odd pattern of stealing books that cross her path.
This author has an extraordinary gift for capturing the light in the great darkness that was the war years in Germany. I feel his appreciation of words and language warming and tugging at my heart, echoed in Liesel's character, who learns to read and write with the help of her foster father, Hans, an accordionist with a huge heart.
"The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this."
This book will always hold a place on my list of top 5 brilliant books. I've yet to find an historical fiction that will best it.
It's uniqueness is very hard to articulate, but if you'll take me at my word, I can vouch for its brilliance.
It has a resonance that continues to reverberate through me years after my first reading. The beauty and brutality of humanity is trapped within it's pages. It calls to me, and I know I'll be compelled to read it time and time again through my life, appreciating and despairing over it more and more with each read.
"Even Death has a heart."
If you've read this book, please let me know your thoughts. I thrive on discussing it!
If you haven't read it - do it now!!! It's a book I think everyone should read before they die.
Happy reading!
Find me @zuzuspages for more bookish content:
Zuzu 🖋
Such a beautiful and moving book, I love that it is narrated by Death and that he is so taken with the main character - highly recommend this also 💚 x
ReplyDeleteIt's so unique and I've not read a WWII fiction that lives up to it since x
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