The Book Thief. When I was in Stockholm this past November, a friend of mine accompanied me to a book store. She bought this book, put it in my hands, and said "you have to read this book! It's an amazing book and you should suggest it to your book club."
I just now started reading it, (since we don't have any required reading for this month), and I am already fascinated by it after only the first couple of chapters.
-Martina
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The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young German foster child living in a small town during the late 1930s and early 1940s. What she witnesses and experiences is tragic enough, but what makes Zusak’s novel especially compelling is that the person narrating Liesel’s story is Death himself.
The brilliance of Zusak’s novel is the way Death relates the events of Liesel’s life. The narrator is possibly the most interesting of all the characters in the novel, and Zusak does a masterful job of creating a believable persona for Death. He has a kind of wisdom and sensitivity that one might find surprising from a being whose job it is to cart away the souls of the dead. Death also foreshadows and in some cases pointedly reveals all the major events of the story because he wants to spare his readers emotional pain. This is a caring, insightful narrator, and I came to think of him as the Angel of Death, rather than as simply death personified.
Video interview with the author:
http://youtu.be/m7B8ioiZz7M
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