THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak was chosen by my book group as their April selection.
When I learned it was a YA book, I groaned.
When I learned it was about the Second World War in Germany, I groaned again.
Then I found out it was about a ten-year old girl orphaned and sent to live with a foster family. Jeez, I thought. Can't we ever read a happy book?
THE BOOK THIEF was not a happy book. But it was a highly original book-much more so than most adult novels I read. I don't even understand why someone classified it as YA. Is every book with a YA hero classified as YA? This is a book teachers might choose for teens, but I can't imagine them choosing it for themselves.
The narrator in THE BOOK THIEF is Death and he tells the story from the standpoint of someone overwhelmed with his mission during the war. Death has his hands full.
But THE BOOK THIEF is even more the story of a young girl who loses her family and is sent to live with a foster family in a small German town. She can't read at first but values books greatly and collects them in whatever way she can. Her foster father reads to her every night from the improbable books she finds or steals. The family is kind, both to her and to a Jewish man fleeing the Nazis who is hiding in their basement.
This book certainly humanizes the German people. We watch them starve, freeze and die. Certainly its portrait of Nazis is acute. But with THE READER and this book, the trend is now to understand the Germans were victims of Hitler and fascism too. Maybe it is time to think about this.
It's really hard to do that though, knowing the smell of gassed bodies was mere miles away. Still, THE BOOK THIEF is a book worth reading.
CHECK OUT MORE FIRST WEDNESDAY BOOK REVIEWS AT BARRIE SUMMY'S PLACE.
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