Book Review | The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

If there’s one book that surprised me, it’s The Book Thief. I brushed it off for the longest time due to my aversion to historical fiction and young adult novels. However, an unexpected trip to Poland, with a visit to Auschwitz on the agenda, led me to reconsider. It all started with Elie Weisel’s Night, but my wife’s suggestion for our girls to read The Book Thief truly piqued my interest. Narrated by Death, this story of Liesel’s resilience and growth during World War Two captivated me from the first chapter. It’s a beautiful and powerful narrative.

Narrated by Death, it tells the story of Liesel, who moves in with her new foster parents, Hans and Rosa, after her mother can no longer care for her. On the train to her new home with her mother, who will leave her with foster parents, Liesel’s younger brother dies, and she steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook. Hans teaches Liesel to read and write, and she develops a love of books, developing some kleptomania for them, even stealing them from Nazis before she even knows to read them. As the story develops, Hans and Rosa hide a Jewish man named Max Vandenburg in their basement, and Leisel develops a relationship with him as he hides in the basement. Eventually, Max is forced to leave when authorities begin to notice the family. While carrying laundry for her mother to wash for the Mayor’s wife, Liesel also befriends her, Ilsa, who lets her read in her library.

And now the stage is set. In a year Hitler will send German troops to invade Poland, then Denmark and Norway, followed by France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and beyond. In a year or two, more Allied planes will begin to bomb the heartland of the Fatherland, returning to Germany the pain it administered to others, with little discrimination. It would be a bloody and deadly chapter in Europe’s and the world’s history, and the innocent would be those worst abused and harmed by the carnage.

Into this milieu drops the young Liesel, alone, poor, fostered to strangers by parents who are themselves disappearing into Nazi concentration camps. She is ignorant, alone, and broken, and as she drops into the home of Hans and Rosa, her life is at a nadir. To use a more modern label, she is at risk, and many would write her off as a lost cause.

And yet, something about her catches Death’s attention, and his admiration for her spills out as he narrates her story, for rather than decline into a miserable abyss of wartime Germany, the love of Hans and Rosa and others insight into her growth to become a powerful and inspiring figure. Zusak’s telling kept me hanging on his every word from the first chapter. Even as one tragedy after another crosses her path, the beauty of her path makes it impossible to love her. They say that great fiction requires that characters grow, even at high cost, and Zusak ensures that Liesel pays every possible cost in her growth.

It’s a beautiful book, and I wish I had found it sooner. I hope you’ll pick it up if you’ve not read it yet and not waste any time bringing this beautiful story into your life.

When Death has a story to tell, you listen.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.