The Book Thief

by Markus Zusak

Paper Book, 2005

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5-star books, Read but unowned

Description

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

Media reviews

The New York Times Book Review

The Australian writer Markus Zusak's brilliant and hugely ambitious new young-adult novel is startling in many ways, but the first thing many teenagers will notice is its length: 552 pages! It's one thing to write a long book about, say, a boy who happens across a dragon's egg; it's quite another

to write a long, achingly sad, intricately structured book about Nazi Germany narrated by Death itself.

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The Washington Post

The book's length, subject matter and approach might give early teen readers pause, but those who can get beyond the rather confusing first pages will find an absorbing and searing narrative.

The New York Times

"The Book Thief" attempts and achieves great final moments of tear-jerking sentiment. And Liesel is a fine heroine, a memorably strong and dauntless girl. But for every startlingly rebellious episode... there are moments that are slack.

San Francisco Chronicle

Writing fiction about the Holocaust is a risky endeavor. Most children learn about it in history class, or through nonfiction narratives like Eli Wiesel's "Night." Zusak has done a useful thing by hanging the story on the experience of a German civilian, not a camp survivor, and humanizing the

choices that ordinary people had to make in the face of the Führer. It's unlikely young readers will forget what this atrocity looked like through the eyes of Death.

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USA Today

The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The

Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a classic.

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The Age

Zusak has written, in his 30th year, one of the most unusual and compelling of recent Australian novels. He gives its last words to Death, who confesses "I am haunted by humans". Those whom we encounter in The Book Thief have that power over the reader, too.

Lecturalia

Érase una vez un pueblo donde las noches eran largas y la muerte contaba su propia historia... Una novela preciosa, tremendamente humana y emocionante, que describe las peripecias de una niña alemana de nueve años desde que es dada en adopción por su madre hasta el final de la guerra. Su nueva

familia, gente sencilla y nada afecta al nazismo, le enseña a leer y a través de los libros Liesel logra distraerse durante los bombardeos y combatir la tristeza. Pero es el libro que ella misma está escribiendo el que finalmente le salvará la vida.

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