Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. New York: Knopf, 2005.

It is the late 1930’s Nazi Germany and Liesel Meminger and her brother are being taken to live with a family in the town of Molching, Germany by their mother when he unexpectedly dies on the way. When she arrives to her foster parents’ home, she only has one book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, which she finds as they are burying her brother. Soon after she arrives, Liesel begins to have nightmares and her kind foster father wakes up to take care of her, teaching her to read during the nighttime interruptions. Liesel begins to get into a routine, going to school, helping her mother in her laundry business and befriending a neighborhood boy named Rudy. Liesel and Rudy grow up together as the war increases in violence, getting in trouble along the way. The war continues to rage on, with the family having to take on the added worry of bombing attacks. Liesel’s foster mother’s business decreases, while her foster father has trouble getting work because he is not a member of the Nazi Party. To further complicate matters, her foster family helps to hide a Jewish man, with whom Liesel becomes close. Liesel, who has become an excellent reader along the way, devours and longs for book so much so she begins to steal them from the large library of the mayor’s wife. The story culminates in the sudden bombing of Liesel’s street, devastating and demolishing the life to which Liesel has grown to love.

A novel replete with lavish vocabulary, rich with themes and seeped in history, The Book Thief gives the reader an opportunity to learn about World War II by using the voice of a young girl. Focused and calculated, the story is flowing and intense. The text reads with intent given to every sentence, lending to the purposefulness of each word. School Library Journal’s Francisca Goldsmith speaks to this fact: “Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrase and lines.” The consideration given to the manuscript allows the author to truly create a specific and all-encompassing style and setting that contributes to the novel in innumerable ways.

In using a different voice (a child instead of an adult, a German instead of a Jew) the story is able to tell a tale, so many times told before, from an unusual perspective. The author is then able to show the struggle of a young person trying to find herself amid the chaos by which she is surrounded. Narrated by Death himself, Liesel is faced with the struggles of girl coming into adulthood, but also one who is coming aware of what is happening in the world. She and the people in her life have not completely bought into the Nazi regime, but they do what they have to in order to get by and not bring attention upon their family. This open-ended aspect allows Liesel to freely make up her own mind about how she feels about the war, instead of her family deciding that for her. This allowance gives the author an opportunity to invest time in creating personal triumphs and tensions for Liesel without the added pressure of accepting a life her foster parents have created for her.

Using the time period he did, Zusak is able to use the war and its conflicts to create a setting that becomes a second character. The war is a distant concern, until it becomes real by the promise of possible bombings and having to run to underground shelters with nearly her entire street. In doing this, the war becomes a character with the same sort of growth and development as a main character. Battles and clashes seem like a faint distraction in the beginning, but as time goes on and the war escalates the formerly far-away unease becomes localized and the sense of impending death grows. By giving the war an ever-increasing prominence, a sense of reality is given to the work. At the beginning of the Hitler administration, his rule trickled down little by little, until Germany was completed immersed in his thoughts and ways. In writing about the slow progression of the war’s effects on the people of Germany, the story reads as genuine, authentic and truthful.

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