Young adult literature is one of the perks of teaching high school. Even if I might not be able to teach it exclusively I’m exposed to it all the time whether in the school library or through direct recommendations from my students. The Book Thief is the kind of young adult novel that doesn’t come around often and I’m a little disappointed in myself that it’s taken me this long to read it. It talks about WWII in a refeshing but heartbreaking way and Liesel Meminger’s voice rings just as true as Anne Frank’s did when I was in middle school.
Liesel, our Book Thief, is a young German girl growing up in the turmoil of WWII. She’s lost her mother for reasons she doesn’t understand, buried her brother, and been forced to move and live with a strange gamily that’s agreed to take her in. While Liesel is not able to read as her story begins she has an instinctive understanding of the power of words. She craves them, she collects them, she loses herself in them. Liesel and her adoptive father begin a quest to teach Liesel to read as she painstakingly makes her way through the only book she has. The more she reads the more words she craves and when her foster parents agree to hide a Jew in their basement she begins to collect his words as well as the two paint over the pages of Mein Kampf to create a new story, full of hope.
Liesel’s story, narrated by the charming and disconcerting personified death, is hear breaking. Something about the way Zusak writes has you caring for these characters by the end of page one even though you know the ending can’t be a happy one. While there is a large selection of excellent books surrounding the events of the Holocaust something about this one pushes it to the top. You aren’t brought inside the concentration camps or tossed into the front lines, instead Zusak brings you another kind of horror. You are forced to see propaganda at its worst. You must watch as Germans avert their eyes to save their families and even worse, as they begin to buy in to the Nazi propaganda for themselves.
Written in lyrical prose that flows from page to page it’s the subject matter that makes Zusak’s book hard to read and impossible to finish without shedding a tear or two. Written in a modern style that brings this tragedy into the 21st century it may be time we see this classic replace some of the old standbys.