The Book Thief

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Synopsis

It's 1939 in Nazi Germany. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are about to be given to a foster family, but on the way to Munich her brother dies on the train. At the graveside, she commits her first act of book thievery when she finds The Grave Digger's Handbook half-hidden in the snow and tucks it into her coat. At the home of her new foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, Liesel suffers from nightmares about her brother's death. Each night Hans comes to comfort her, and when he discovers the book under her mattress, he offers to help her learn to read it. Thus begins a love affair with books and words for Liesel. Over time, she takes more books, one from a Nazi book-burning and more from the library of the mayor's wife. When Hans and Rosa decide to hide a Jew in their basement, Liesel befriends him and they connect over a shared love of words. She also becomes friends with Rudy, a neighbor her own age with whom she gets into mischief. But eventually the war comes to their little town and Liesel is destined to suffer more loss.

Review

The Book Thief is a stand-alone, YA, historical fiction novel. In 1939 Nazi Germany, eleven-year-old Liesel Meminger is on a train to Munich with her mother who intends to turn Liesel and her younger brother over to foster parents, but before they can reach their destination, Liesel's brother dies. At the graveside, Liesel finds a book titled The Grave Digger's Handbook, which becomes the first book that she steals. When she arrives at her new foster parents' home, she has few possessions, but the book becomes a cherished one, even though she's illiterate and can't read it. Every night she suffers from nightmares about her brother's death, and each night her foster father, Hans Hubermann, comes to her room to comfort her. When he discovers the book under her mattress, he asks her if she'd like to read it, and proceeds to slowly teach her to read in the wee hours of the night when the dreams awaken her. Liesel makes friends with a neighbor boy named Rudy and together they get up to mischief. Liesel eventually steals another book that survives a Nazi book burning, and becomes enamored of the library belonging to the wife of the town mayor. Then one day, Max, a young Jewish man with ties to Hans shows up on their doorstep and the Hubermanns embark on the risky prospect of hiding him in their basement. Liesel befriends him and they share a love of books and words. An eventual falling out with the mayor's wife leads Liesel to begin stealing books from her library. The books sustain, not only Liesel, but also her neighbors, as she reads to them during the long nights in basement air raid shelters. But eventually Liesel is destined to suffer more loss as the war trudges on.

This book has several main characters, but Liesel is the title character, the book thief. The story opens with her going through loss and abandonment, but she finds a degree of solace in the home of her foster parents, particularly from her foster father, Hans, who becomes a beloved figure for her. Hans is a good father who protects and comforts Liesel, perhaps seeing her as a new chance at parenting since his own children, especially his son, are supportive of the Nazi party, while he isn't really interested in being a member of the party. He holds no animus toward Jews, and in fact, feels indebted to one who saved his life during World War I, which is what leads him to harbor that man's son in his basement. Rosa Hubermann is a woman who can be harsh and what I felt was verbally abusive sometimes, but deep down she does care about Hans, Liesel, and their neighbors. Liesel's best friend, Rudy, has an obsession with track star Jesse Owens, isn't impressed at all with the Hitler Youth group of which he's compelled to be a part, and gets up to no good on occasion. He's always trying to talk Liesel into kissing him, but respects her decision not to. As time goes on, their friendship deepens. Max, the young Jewish man the Hubermanns decide to hide, feels helpless and constantly worries for the family's safety. With little else to do, he reads a lot and does some writing, too, that speaks to Liesel. There are also the many townspeople of Molching, the small town just outside Munich, where they live, who add color and flavor to the story. And then there's Death, who is the narrator, which I thought was a bold and unusual choice.

The Book Thief is widely considered to be a YA novel, probably because of the youth of its main protagonist, so this is where I'll evaluate it for potentially objectionable content. Various curse words are peppered throughout, in both English and German, including religious profanities. Characters often seem to use insulting language toward one another. With Death as the narrator, the story unsurprisingly deals with a fair bit of death, beginning with the passing of Liesel's young brother and ending with a bombing that tragically kills several characters. There is wartime violence, most of which is fairly distant with the people of Molching sometimes going to their underground shelters to wait out the bombs. But there are a couple of prominent incidents, one involving a crashed Allied plane with a dying pilot trapped inside that the people find after one such bombing, and another where Hans is doing cleanup after bombings and finds a dead child with a grieving mother looking for him. These scenes aren't overly graphic though. A soldier returns with missing fingers and a still-bleeding wound, though it's wrapped in bandages. A character commits suicide, again not really graphic, but it could be distressing for some people, especially teens. A character engages in blackface that's meant to be an admiring gesture toward a famous black person. A couple of groups of Jews are marched through the town on their way to Dachau. They're clearly starving and a character is whipped for offering bread to one, along with the Jew he tried to feed. Rudy and two other boys are made to strip naked at school in front of adults who are evaluating them for recruitment into an elite Nazi unit. There may have been other things, but these are the only ones I can recall. In my opinion, most of these things could probably be handled by mature teens of about fifteen and up.

I'd been looking forward to reading The Book Thief for a while, but I have to admit that it didn't end up being quite what I was expecting. There's an underlying theme about reading and the power of words as Liesel learns to read, opening up a whole new world for her. However, I couldn't help feeling that the title of The Book Thief was slightly disingenuous. Yes, Liesel does steal a few books throughout the story, but not as many I thought she would. I also had a preconceived notion that she was going to mostly be stealing books from Nazi book burnings, but that only happens once. The others were the very first book she took from her brother's graveside and the rest came from the library of the mayor's wife. However, it turns out that the woman was aware that Liesel was taking them and didn't have a problem with it, so is that really stealing? I'm not quite sure how I felt about Death being the narrator either. It gave the story a dark overtone, though perhaps not as dark as it could have been, as Death seems to be rather weary of his job. I think what bothered me about it is that Death was basically an omniscient narrator, which meant that there's more telling than showing and I didn't feel like I got to know the characters quite as deeply as I would have if it had been written from their POVs. There were also several instances of events being left rather ambiguous, when I really wanted more details. Another thing that wasn't entirely to my liking is that the book contains a lot of metaphor and symbolism. As someone on the autism spectrum, I struggle a lot with interpreting these things, so I tend to avoid books that have a lot of symbolic language. Some of it made sense to me, but a lot of it just went over my head, making it harder to be engaged in the story. That's not to say that I didn't like The Book Thief. Overall, it was a good book, just not a great one for me, and given all the accolades it's received and the phenomenal ratings at online book sites, I simply expected to feel more while reading it and come away more impressed than I was.

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Markus Zusak