Parents might want to read The Book Thief first (I’d highly recommend you do, for your own benefit, anyway) to best judge how it would suit their teen or preteen readers.When it comes to choosing a narrator, Zusak knocked it out of the park. Some of it is in German, but there’s still quite a bit of English-language cursing. It doesn’t have any “strong” language, but it is liberally dosed with “moderate” language. Adult readers might be a little shocked at just how much language this book contains. The Book Thief is one of the most powerful, poignant, beautiful novels I’ve read in some time. The emotion he elicits from the reader is genuine and never cheaply bought. I was in awe, page after page, of the style that can somehow combine subtlety and nuance with pack-a-punch emotion. The narrative is poetic, lyrical, and breathtakingly beautiful. His writing is full of original metaphors that are often almost concrete.

Markus Zusak makes his characters so vivid, so three-dimensional, that even Death seems very alive. She yearns, she dreams, she has nightmares. She misses her mother and her dead brother. She finds a friend in a Jewish man her parents hide in their basement. She connects with her new parents and with her neighbors. She owns nothing but steals a few books over the course of a few years and ends up writing her own. And those who do anything to help the Jews have much more to fear.Įven so, the novel is so multilayered that it’s about so many things - about a girl who finds some power in words, in books. They still must live with severe food shortages and constant fear - of being conscripted into the army, of their neighborhoods being bombed, of simply being at the center of conflict. In a nutshell, it’s the story of the ordinary German citizens, both those who side with their “führer” and those who don’t necessarily care about or support him. It’s told from the point of view of a girl and her foster family who are very German - so one could say it’s a story about the other side of the coin. The Book Thief is not just another novel about the Holocaust or the plight of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany, per se. This reality is underlined by the fact that the story is narrated by Death. This is one of the first losses that Liesel suffers in this powerful story - more are yet to come. Her brother doesn’t survive the journey by train. In Nazi Germany, Liesel and her brother are being taken by their mother to a foster home so they will have better living conditions.

The book thief of the title is a young girl named Liesel Meminger.

The book thief original cover