The Book Thief by Markus ZusakMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
The Book Thief is an uncomfortable book.
The setting is Germany in World War 2, certainly an uncomfortable place. The central character, Liesel, loses her brother, is taken from her mother, and placed with a foster family. Nearly everyone they know is poor, struggling to survive, even before the war comes to their doors.
The writing is uncomfortable, at least for me. The style is simple and easy to follow, but I found it uninteresting and was often bored. Very little happens in this book, it seemed to me. There are few major events and those are described quickly, with the majority of the book taken up with the slow, steady grind of difficult daily life.
Death is quite literally present throughout the entire book, because he is the narrator. Taking an interest in Liesel's story after she is present at his duty several times early in life, he tracks the minutia of her life for several years. This sounded intriguing to me at first, but interesting observations from the point of view of Death were few and far between.
I can see why The Book Thief is an important story. It describes a difficult but important time and place. But the style is emphatically not for me.
