Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Book Theif


The Book Thief

*****

"I'm haunted by humans."

"You save someone.  
You kill them."

"It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding."


The Book Thief is a phenomenal story told from the point of Death himself.  It's sad, happy, warm, cold, black, white, and glorious.  A world so real is wrapped around you in Zusak's warm blanket of words and metaphors, where one girl steals a book from the snow, and from then on the story is unstoppable.  Nazis parade down Heaven Street, a jew writes in a basement, a girl scrapes her knee playing soccer.  A dusty book is slipped from the shelf of the mayor's library, and a bomb explodes.  Death comes, life unfolds.  The Book Thief encompasses the best and the worst of what is human, and tells a story of a young girl experiencing life in one one of the worst times in human history.  One of the best things about Zusak's writing style in The Book Thief was the way he described words as physical objects, and it made his own words that much more tangible.  This book seems to hold everything we know about the world in it's black type.  Life, love, hate, desperation, loss.  It's humanity, and it's waiting in the pages of this eerie, beautiful book.