Synopsis (from amazon)
HERE IS A SMALL FACT – YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier.
Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION – THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH
It’s a small story, about:
a girl
an accordionist
some fanatical Germans
a Jewish fist fighter
and quite a lot of thievery.
ANOTHER THING YOU SHOULD KNOW – DEATH WILL VISIT THE BOOK THIEF THREE TIMES
Review
Oh wow! Someone asked me if they should bother reading this (whilst I was still reading it) because they’d heard that the ending was horrible. Which is a bit of a silly thing to ask about really. A story narrated by death, in Nazi Germany, pretty much guaranteed to to have some not very happy bits. Yes, by the way, the end is pretty horrible but inevitable, and not unexpected. With death being the narrator it means that you do get some sort of inkling of some of the things which will happen. Not the complete situation, but enough not to be too surprised.
You would think that with knowing what would happen would make you stop yourself from getting too attached to the characters involved, or stop you from being too sad when things happen to them. Somehow it didn’t however. Maybe it was where the hints were placed, that we got to know the characters enough to be a little attached already. Maybe it was that you can’t really stop yourself from becoming attached to characters even when you really, really don’t want to be attached to them.
Either way I did feel attached. At times that made things heart wrenchingly sad. At times it brought tears to my eyes.
But I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
4.5/5
Buy it:
Paperback (£3.50) Edition other than shown
Kindle (£0.99)
Other Reviews:
So Long and Thanks For All The Fish
Book Journey
Knitting and Sundries
Earphoria
Reading is The Ultimate Aphrodisiac
Yeah, pretty much everyone has read this!
