The Book Thief (Paperback)

In this dark and powerfully absorbing novel, brilliantly executed by Australian author, Markus Zusak, Death narrates “just a small story, really.” It turns out to be the story of “the book thief,” Liesel Meminger, her foster family, neighbourhood friends, a Jewish amateur prizefighter in hiding, and a world gone mad with a global war and the horrors of the Holocaust. The Grim Reaper’s riveting tale goes far beyond “just a small story”, and every page deserves to be read.
For openers Death describes the shock of his first, but not his last, visit to “nine years old, soon to be ten” Liesel and her family. It is 1939 when he arrives to claim Liesel’s six-year-old brother on the train the youngsters and their mother are taking to Molching, just outside of Munich. With their father imprisoned as a Communist, and their mother unable to care for them, the children are to be left at 33 Himmel Street with foster parents, Rosa and Hans Hubermann. But Death intervenes, and when the boy is buried, Liesel steals a copy of “The Gravedigger’s Handbook: A Twelve-Step Guide to Grave-Digging Success”, the first of the several books Death describes her pilfering during her illustrious book-thieving career.
At her new home Liesel meets foster-mother Rosa, who iron-fistedly rules the Hubermann roost, her face “decorated with constant fury,” lamenting all the while that her own children have left home, one as a soldier. Berating Liesel as a “Saumensch”, Rosa co-opts her into cleaning houses, including the Mayor’s, to help bolster the family’s meagre income. To offset Rosa’s roughness, Liesel’s accordion-playing foster-father, Hans, “an un-special person” with eyes “made of kindness and silver” takes her under his wing. With his drawings of the alphabet, he laboriously teaches her to read “The Gravedigger’s Handbook” when she gets in trouble with the nuns and her classmates for her inability to read. In the schoolyard and on the street she bonds with a soccer playing chum, Rudy Steiner, who is so enamoured with Jesse Owens that he blackens his face and sprints the 100-yard dash in the dark of night. Enamoured of Liesel as well as of his track and field hero, Rudy tries constantly but without success to win a kiss from her, using various pretexts, some of them quite funny.
While Death whispers his dire asides about Liesel’s life and war rages around the youngsters for the four or so years of the story, they skirt the yellow-starred Jewish homes on Schiller Strasse, elude their schoolyard enemies, join a gang of young thieves and thugs, and feign allegiance to the Nazi regime even when Rudy is harassed and beaten. And as Liesel’s love of reading grows, so does her thievery, even to the point of snatching one book from a bonfire and others from the Mayor’s library, often with Rudy in tow and always with tattletale Death right behind.
Adding to the “small story”, the Reaper relays the intimate details of the Hubermann’s sheltering a Jewish fugitive, Max Vandenburn, first in Liesel’s room, then in the basement, keeping him hidden from neighbourhood snoops and an unexpected visit from bomb shelter inspectors that sends everyone scurrying. When Max becomes ill, Liesel nurses him back to health by reading to him from her cache of stolen classics, while Rosa and Hans fret about what to do if he dies. Max survives Death’s call but ridden with guilt for the fear he is causing the family he makes an unsuccessful run for it.
And as tag-along Death spins his tales further, he tells, sometimes smugly and sometimes compassionately, of the souls he determinedly harvests, singly or in batches, from the wartime bombing raids, from the processions of Die Juden to the Nazi death camps, and from the ravages of the Allied offensives on Lubeck, Cologne and Munich. And before he is done he tells how foster-father Hans and Rudy’s father are both conscripted; how 45000 die in the bombings of Hamburg; how the awful processions continue, and how when Liesel finds Max shackled and marching in one of them, they are both whipped for embracing. Then, he tells of how he comes to visit Liesel again when Himmel Street is destroyed overnight and he spirits away all but one of those closest to her, just as in 1939 he took her brother during their first meeting on the train when she was but “nine years old, soon to be ten” and the “small story” was still to be told.
Zusak’s unique novel of a “small story” is monumental in its cinematic sweep and compelling in its personification of the Grim Reaper graphically going about his daily job of “handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.” As a memorable rendering of an unforgettable period in history it should easily capture and hold the hearts and minds of its readers.
M. Wayne Cunningham (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

Starred Review. Grade 9 Up–Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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