Australian writer Markus Zusak’s teenage novel is startling in many ways, but the first thing many teenagers notice is its length: 552 pages. It is one thing to write a long book, for example, a boy comes across an egg from a dragon; quite different from writing a long, painful, intricately structured Nazi book narrated by Death himself.
Readers are introduced to this Death Storyteller concept in an overly long call to start “Book Thief”. This is not Death – we have here a kinder, gentler Death, who sympathizes with our victims. As Death himself wrote on Page 1: “I can be cute. Good. Affordable. And that’s just point A.” Perhaps so, but Death was so harmless that he was not very attractive or influential. His decisive settlements are not the novel’s most productive moments.
But this book isn’t about Death; it’s about death, and so much else. Principally it is about Liesel Meminger, whose little brother dies just before Liesel’s mother leaves her with foster parents in a dismal town in southern Germany.
Her new Papa is the implausibly saintly Hans Hubermann, so good a person he even manages to love his wife, Rosa, who is one of the more memorable foster moms in young-adult fiction. She looks, Death tells us, “like a small wardrobe with a coat thrown over it. There was a distinct waddle to her walk. Almost cute, if it wasn’t for her face.” Rosa periodically beats Liesel with a wooden spoon, and uses exceedingly foul language. Much of it can’t be quoted in a family newspaper, but suffice it to say that she routinely refers to her husband and foster daughter as “filthy pigs.” Still, she cares for Liesel — and as Death eventually shows us, “She was a good woman for a crisis.”
This is a novel that will change your mind and it is a “not to be missed” book. And the comment section is also full of urging readers who pass by to find and read it, to know what is hidden behind the book full of charm in both content and words. I highly recommend this book for you and rate it for 4.5 stars.
Source: Internet
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