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Death book thief6/22/2023 Now: a woman is viciously stabbed to death in the upmarket kitchen of her beautiful house on the edge of the marshes. Twenty years ago: a farmer and his wife are cut to pieces by a ruthless serial killer. I've become fond of the characters and look forward to spending more time with them. Now I've bought the first book and will read #1-#7. It seems poised to become a classic.I recently finished the last two of the published books in this series (#8 - The Night Thief and #9 - Solace House). 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. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Hans may not shout anti-Nazi slogans he has a family to protect but he endures a whipping when he hands a piece of bread to a starving Jew being led to a concentration camp. Rosa is an unlikable character whose nobility shows itself when her bravery and compassion are put to the test. The author doesn't portray these protectors of Jews as completely noble. Zusak does an amazing job imagining what it might be like to live as a fugitive for years, hungry, cold, never seeing the sun. Max is in his 20s, the son of a soldier Hans fought with in World War I. Her foster family hides a Jew in the basement for two years. But Liesel is also burdened with a dangerous secret. She and her friends, though always hungry, continue to play street games, participate in sports, go to school. She, of course, is the book thief of the title, and the books she steals from the cemetery where her brother is buried, from a Nazi bonfire and from the mayor's library are symbolic of her struggle to understand the horrors of war.īeyond books, Liesel learns the worst and best in humankind. Liesel's brother dies on the way to Molching, near Munich, and she is left on her own. She and her younger brother have been separated from their mother, who has been branded a communist. Liesel is 10 when she moves in with foster parents Rosa and Hans Hubermann in the early 1940s. But he does see the good in people, especially Liesel Meminger. He has been a weary witness to the world's misery, and the souls he gathers during this war are no different from any others. But anyone who gets that far will be rewarded with a compelling portrait of a girl's struggle to survive and maintain a modicum of happiness in unfortunate surroundings.ĭeath's narration is matter-of-fact. The first 40 or so pages are dismal and tough to slog through. Tackling The Book Thief will take some determination on the part of the reader. One only hopes adults also will discover The Book Thief. publisher chose to release it as a young-adult book, believing young readers can and will attempt a 550-page novel that realistically portrays the Holocaust. The Australian Zusak, 30, is the acclaimed author of four young-adult books, yet The Book Thief, his fifth, was released Down Under as an adult novel in 2005, presumably because of its dark subject matter. But the novel's grim, all-knowing narrator is Death who better to recount bombings, battles and annihilation? Markus Zusak's The Book Thief is about a young girl struggling to survive in war-torn Europe in the 1940s.
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