The Book Thief
Ratings1,266
Average rating4.3
I loved everything about this book. No time for an extended review. I can't imaging anyone not enjoying this book.
I'm not sure why I didn't connect with this book. It got off to a slow start for me and I had to push myself to keep reading it. This is becoming a trend for me. I think it's personal problem and not a book problem.
I didn't mind the intrusive narrator, though I don't usually like to be told what's coming. It feels cheap or something but it sort of worked here. The unique narrative style was actually the best thing about this book. I'm a character reader and even though the characters were well drawn, I can't say I loved them, with the exception of Rosa. I can usually get behind some good ol' love-disguised-as-mild-verbal-abuse.
My first read of 2014 and my first review for months and months. I wish I could muster more than “meh.”
I bawled like a baby at the end of this book. Very interesting to read a novel from the WWII German point of view.
I was initially taken aback by the book's narrator and disappointed that a book I had hoped, and thought, I would really enjoy was not going to be enjoyable after all. I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie, and I need to see the movie in the next week or so, so I decided to keep reading and hope for the best.
I'm so glad I did. I fell in love with not only the characters, but also the beauty of the writing, the poetry, the word choice, the stories within stories. I would have preferred a little less foreshadowing but that is my only critique.
Beautiful book about a horrible time in our history.
Tragic and beautiful all at once
A book you can't stop thinking about after you read it
Needed to read before the movie was released. Adjusting to the narrator, the beginning was a little confusing, strange, and slow. Midway through I couldn't put it down. Great character development. The story of times when children have to beyond their years.
Quote page 526: “Her hand was sore by page three. Words are so heavy, she thought, but as the night wore on, she was able to complete eleven pages.”
This book had a great story. I wish that I had read it when it first came out. When it first came out I was in middle school and Anne Frank would have been fresh in my head. Also, I couldn't help but find the narrator a little angsty, something that I wouldn't have minded, or perhaps noticed, then.
There are some books that can both delight and devastate you at the same time....The Book Thief is one of those books. Beautifully, wonderfully written with characters that became instant favourites, but also heart-wrenchingly tragic in the telling. I don't think I will recover from it any time soon. The word-play is nothing short of poetic brilliance and the story-telling is truly the best I've read in a VERY long time - I laughed, I loved, I sobbed and I think my heart broke when I finished the last page.
This book. I didn't know what I should think about it at the beginning,and even halfway through. I even would've stopped reading if there weren't some pages so beautifully written. I continued and thought I would give this book 3 stars max after completing. Then came the ending. The last 10-15% of the book were a river of beautiful words, arranged to heartbreaking sentences. Each new page became more powerful, beautiful and sad. I closed the book and said: “Wow”.
And here is my 5 star rating. If books aren't here to provoke such feelings, than I don't know why I am still reading.
I couldn't connect with The Book Thief the way I was supposed to, the way everyone else has. It has some great moments, especially toward the end. I loved the way Liesel saw the world and I certainly felt her emotions coming through the page. Also, I loved the character of Rudy. For me, the crux of the book was nestled in that kiss between Liesel and Rudy. The book swung back and forth on the hinge that was that eventual kiss. I loved it. And the language: sure, sometimes it was saturated with a bit too much effort on the author's part, but largely it was beautiful and very poetic. So I sort of liked this book, and wished I could've given it more than three stars, but it just didn't move me in a way that felt natural.
Largely, I think this was the fault of Death. Writing from the perspective of “Death” is something I believe only a very talented and experienced author can pull off without sounding like a first-year MFA student hoping to impress his classmates. An author who wants to write from such a unique vantage point needs to write flawlessly in a voice that doesn't fall back too often on obvious human thoughts and emotion. It can be done, but it's something that should be left to the masters. Zusak does an admirable job, but not well enough that the voice was not an almost constant question of validity. Death sounds more like a poetic overgrown child than something outside of our grasp. The entity that carries away thousands of dead a day snatches away the “bad guys” without a care, but stops to smell the roses and cries when the “good guys” die. Death reads books, and walks, and breathes, believes in luck and God. Death was all too familiar. In fact, I found Liesel with her unique perspective and experience to be more mysterious, yet believable than Death. In my opinion, she would've made a more impressive and convincing narrator. With a different narrator, I might have loved this book, but Death and I just weren't meant to be.
A book you finish and want to share with everyone you know. Amazing use of language and style to capture the idea of words being “live” things that can help as well as harm. If you are a book lover, you'll love the way reading, books and writing become almost human in this story. At first, I struggled to get used to the idea of “Death” being the narrator, and the time-shifting in the story, but soon it became simply the “way” this story had to be told. And it works beautifully—I imagine there are thousands of quotes and “likes” from this book circulating in the Goodreads community. It is definitely well worth reading by anyone, not just “young adults”. I also think it would make a good companion read to a nonfiction account of the Holocaust, like [bc:The Diary of a Young Girl 48855 The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358276407s/48855.jpg 3532896]by [ai:Anne Frank 3720 Anne Frank http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg][a:Anne Frank 3720 Anne Frank http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg].
Actually more of a 3.5 star. Liked the story and the attempt to look at the life of common folks caught up in a war. Maybe it's the usage of Death as a narrator, although interesting, that doesn't quite do it for me.
Short Review: A young adult book with the right amount of humor, seriousness and real life. It is hard mix to write a young adult book that is both worth reading and cognizant of the subject matter of World War II Germany. I was glad that the author was able to make Germans into real people without minimizing the atrocities of the war. This is a book worth reading, but I didn't love it as much as some did.
http://bookwi.se/the-book-thief-by-markus-zusak/
I felt like this was one of those books where you know there is something meaningful you're supposed to grasp from it (or some personal revelation you're supposed to glean from the pages) but you don't know what it is. This book gave me that feeling. I felt like it had an almost pointless feel to it.
Having said that, there were so many touching moments that really just took my breath away or left me feeling warmed by humanities ability towards kindness amidst all the pain, brutality and chaos. There were some scenes that I know I will carry with me always and revisit often in quiet moments of contemplation. And maybe that's what the book was supposed to do.
I should also admit that I found the first 100 pages slow and they didn't really grab me right off. I think this was largely due to the jumbled, incoherent beginning when the narrator introduces so many things out of sequence. It was a little difficult to keep track. But after the first 100 pages things start to flow much better.
All in all, I thought it was a good read (wink) and worth the trouble to read at least once. I'm not sure I would read it again though. It was really depressing.
Zusak, 2005, 174-5:“A SMALL BUT NOTEWORTHY NOTEI've seen so many young menover the years who think they'rerunning at other young men.They are not.They're running at me.”
-Death
Zusak, 2005, 376:“The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.”
One remarkable thing that Zusak achieves, is the consistency of voice and character: Liesel, Rudy, Hans, Rosa, Max, Death.
Death was especially well done - an observer who remains removed from humanity and life, yet perhaps understands it better than most.
Love the narrator's voice. Didn't much care for the beginning, but once the story settled down and stopped jumping all over time, I really liked this book.
This is an amazing book filled with beautiful figurative language and an amazing narrator, Death. Set in Nazi Germany it is bound to be a book of tragedy, but Zusak finds beauty and strength in this horrific time period of world history. Everyone should read this.
I loved every page of this book! A lot of literary elements worked in this book that might not work in others, and they all work together here so wonderfully. This is a book about books, about the Holocaust, about World War II, and about a German family.
First, commentary on non-spoilers:
1. The narrator being Death: I loved how this actually manifested in the book. It could have been a gimmick, some reviewers even think it was. But I feel that the narration of this particular story needed to be from a third-person omniscient subjective point of view, and who better than Death itself. Additionally, the narrator was neutral, he didn't like or dislike his job, he didn't like or dislike anything really, although Liesel he definitely seemed to have a soft spot for. Also, I enjoyed the constant little “asides” from the narrator; they inspired a lot of emotion in me like happiness, anger, and sadness just from how they are presented. Very succinct.
2. One of the elements of this book that really sets it apart from a lot of other “Holocaust” fiction (what else would it be called?) is that it is from a non-evil German perspective. Obviously, there must have been some non-Nazi sympathizing Germans (like Oskar Schindler), and this is a story about one such family. Still, despite being German, plenty of the horrors of war and Hitler's regime terrorize Liesel's family. Also, the narrator constantly reminded the reader about these other atrocities of World War II (such as the carnage in Russia and the suppression of the German people). Often, these atrocities aren't as explored in literature as the Holocaust, but they were devastating in their own right. And it's really rare to see a well-known book that explores all of these.
3. I wouldn't classify this book as Young Adult simply because I didn't know history well enough in my formative years to be able to understand the whole thing, so it's difficult to expect all young adults to be ready to tackle this book. Also, I personally preferred more... cheerful books at that age. This is just a general comment; I didn't even realize that it was considered Young Adult until I read reviews on GR about it, long after I had started it.
4. So many great themes to explore in this book made it an absolute delight despite it's depressing story. I think the most in-your-face theme is that about the role of books and words in a person's life. Here's a girl that treasures books, and can have so very few, and everytime I walked by my humble “library”, I thought about how lucky I really am to have so many books that I actually want to read. No Grave Digger's Handbook for me, thank you. The narrator treats words themselves as physical objects (whether spoken, on a page, or just in thought), which I loved: “Burning words were torn from their sentences”, “... the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It crossed its legs.” and “The words were flung at her, landing somewhere on the concrete step.” Lots of great color references as well, so I was busy cross-referencing while I was reading.
And now the spoiler-y parts of the review:
5. Thank goodness for the foreshadowing in this book. The deaths are so painful, especially those of Rudy and Hans. I was prepared though, I knew they were coming, and it made it easier for me to read. And foreshadowing is something that must be used with utmost care. It served well here, and was entirely because of the choice of narrator.6. I cried. This is the first book in my reading career that has made me cry, real big tears, not just a little sniffle and a little wet in the eyes. I had to stop and cry and blow my nose. The part that made me cry was the first book that Max gives Liesel that shows his brief family history. The little drawings in the book, then, were not gimmicky to me in the least bit. I loved both the little stories that Max drew, and they added a lot of depth to this book about books.7. One of the more thought-provoking elements of this book was the suspense that it made me feel even though what I dreaded the most never happened. I expected the family would get caught with the Jewish man in their basement, but they never did. I was on the edge of my seat constantly with this fear. I feel this may be a result of Hollywood and also [b:The Diary of a Young Girl|48855|The Diary of a Young Girl|Anne Frank|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519HKX9M69L._SL75_.jpg|3532896] (Anne Frank) because everyone hiding Jewish people gets caught, and when it happens, it's terrible. So I expected Hans would be carried away, executed, and the same fate would come to Max. It was a pleasant surprise that this didn't actually happen. I'm still thinking about what kind of reader I am that I thought for sure this would happen.
I'm with the many other readers of this fantastic book in giving it 5 well-deserved stars.
(Re-read 13/04/21) Still just as beautiful, forever a favourite of mine. Would recommend to absolutely anyone.
I'm still mulling over exactly how I feel about this book. It's very, very rare for a book to ever make progress from my “partially read” shelf to my “read” shelf. I'm still a little shocked that I actually read this book. I meant to just make another college try at reading it, so that I could reshelve it without guilt. Instead, I found myself 50 pages in, than 100, than 300.I think part of the reason that I hadn't gotten very far in this book before is that I picked it up knowing nearly nothing about it. Being a big fan of [b:How to Buy a Love of Reading 5975766 How to Buy a Love of Reading Tanya Egan Gibson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267911725s/5975766.jpg 6149015] and [b:Special Topics in Calamity Physics 3483 Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200115s/3483.jpg 910619], I anticipated it to be another meta-book. I was extremely disappointed to open it and realize that it was a holocaust book.You see, I spent much of my childhood haunted by the specter of the holocaust. My maternal grandparents are concentration camp survivors, and it felt like it was the only thing that my grandparents ever talked about. Every day in Hebrew school and day camp and overnight camp seemed to be Holocaust day. I think every fiction book my mother has ever read, and certainly every book she has sent to me unsolicited has been about the Holocaust. I think I've read nearly every Holocaust book every written, and the only one to date that I've liked has been [b:A Thread of Grace 16047 A Thread of Grace Mary Doria Russell http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166697257s/16047.jpg 882031] To say I am burned out on the Holocaust is a major understatement. And, more importantly, I was extremely skeptical that there is anything new to say about the Holocaust that hasn't been said already. But once I actually got into The Book Thief, it was gripping. Liesel was so vulnerable in the beginning, Hans was so warm and, I figured, at least it's about communists, not Jews. And then I got into Hans teaching Liesel to read and the beauty of those stark, midnight scenes, illuminated only by paternal love and the desire to read was so beautiful written, and the choice of the Gravedigger's Handbook both poignant and hilarious. Ultimately, what kept me reading was the characters. There's not a single character in the book who is forgetful. And far from being caricatures, all of the characters are well-rounding, with flaws and virtues and react appropriately to situations and change. Perhaps my favorites are the damaged, uncertain mayor's wife and the coarse, prickly, but loving Rosa. The imagery of words is heavy-handed, and often it feels like Zusak is screaming “I'm using imagery here! Look at me!” That being said, the animation of words as a concept is fascinating, and a powerful thread linking the book together. Words fly out of people's mouths, fall heavily and a thousand other movements. Much has been written about death as a narrator, but to me, it felt like a minor part of the novel. It certainly was not overdone: death barely made an appearance in the first 300 pages. By the time he did, it added a nice foreshadowing and helped contextualize the activity within a very small community within the broader setting of world war II.