The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
As one of our Discover readers said recently, "A good book is a good book," regardless of the audience for which it was written. In the spirit of that comment, we heartily recommend The Book Thief for readers of both the adult and teen persuasions.
Australian-born Markus Zusak grew up sitting at the kitchen table, glued to his chair, listening to his mother's tales of her childhood in Nazi Germany. Such tales would later serve as a springboard for his unusual novel about the power of words to both destroy and comfort. A daring work in the adventurous spirit of The Shadow of the Wind, this novel has a bizarre narrator: Death. Drawn into a tense and dangerous historical era, readers discover how Liesel Meminger first learns to read and is transformed into the "book thief," stealing books before they can be burned by the Nazis or confiscated from personal libraries. When her family decides to hide a Jew in the basement, Liesel holds out hope to him in the form of her two most precious commodities: words and stories.
(Summer 2006 Selection)
bn.com
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
As one of our Discover readers said recently, "A good book is a good book," regardless of the audience for which it was written. In the spirit of that comment, we heartily recommend The Book Thief for readers of both the adult and teen persuasions.
Australian-born Markus Zusak grew up sitting at the kitchen table, glued to his chair, listening to his mother's tales of her childhood in Nazi Germany. Such tales would later serve as a springboard for his unusual novel about the power of words to both destroy and comfort. A daring work in the adventurous spirit of The Shadow of the Wind, this novel has a bizarre narrator: Death. Drawn into a tense and dangerous historical era, readers discover how Liesel Meminger first learns to read and is transformed into the "book thief," stealing books before they can be burned by the Nazis or confiscated from personal libraries. When her family decides to hide a Jew in the basement, Liesel holds out hope to him in the form of her two most precious commodities: words and stories.
(Summer 2006 Selection)
Kirkus Reviews
When Death tells a story, you pay attention. Liesel Meminger is a young girl growing up outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, and Death tells her story as "an attempt-a flying jump of an attempt-to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it." When her foster father helps her learn to read and she discovers the power of words, Liesel begins stealing books from Nazi book burnings and the mayor's wife's library. As she becomes a better reader, she becomes a writer, writing a book about her life in such a miserable time. Liesel's experiences move Death to say, "I am haunted by humans." How could the human race be "so ugly and so glorious" at the same time? This big, expansive novel is a leisurely working out of fate, of seemingly chance encounters and events that ultimately touch, like dominoes as they collide. The writing is elegant, philosophical and moving. Even at its length, it's a work to read slowly and savor. Beautiful and important. (Fiction. 12+)
From the Publisher
Brilliant and hugely ambitious…Some will argue that a book so difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers…Adults will probably like it (this one did), but it’s a great young-adult novel…It’s the kind of book that can be life-changing, because without ever denying the essential amorality and randomness of the natural order, The Book Thief offers us a believable hard-won hope…The hope we see in Liesel is unassailable, the kind you can hang on to in the midst of poverty and war and violence. Young readers need such alternatives to ideological rigidity, and such explorations of how stories matter. And so, come to think of it, do adults.” -New York Times
"The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a classic." -USA Today
"Zusak doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but he makes his ostensibly gloomy subject bearable the same way Kurt Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five: with grim, darkly consoling humor.” -Time Magazine
"Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and important." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"This hefty volume is an achievement...a challenging book in both length and subject..." -Publisher's Weekly, Starred
"One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years." -The Wall Street Journal
"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour de force to be not just read but inhabited." -The Horn Book Magazine, Starred
"An extraordinary narrative." -SLJ, Starred
DEC 06/JAN 07 - AudioFile
This powerful Holocaust story is for mature, sophisticated teens and adults. Set in Nazi Germany, narrated by Death, it is 9-year-old Liesel Meminger’s story. Death watches as she steals the first of 14 books at her brother’s funeral, sensing they will feed her soul even before she knows how to read. Allan Corduner gives Death a strong personality with a dispassionate voice that will grip the listener; by turns sardonic, compassionate, with a dark humor, he takes no pride in being part of man’s deadly cruelty to man. Corduner gives Death a voice we rarely imagine for him, as fearful of humans as we are of him, and an unwillingly participant in man’s cruel, deadly events. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
