Critique

I absolutely loved this book. Death is an amazing choice for a narrator, and his style of revealing future and past elements throughout the otherwise linear narrative really captures the way that I believe Death would interpret our human stories. On another note, I’ve already recommended this to many people, and one such person literally said, “Really? Another book about the Holocaust?” 

However, now before you go judging, know that he followed it up by saying that we need more books about other tragedies throughout our history as well. So, the question is begged, “Do we need more books about a tragedy in our history that has saturated our culture in books and movies for the past 20 – 30 years?” Of course the answer is a resounding “yes,” but what we ought to recognize is that it’s important for more voices to be heard, more stories to be told from all of our victories and tragedies throughout history. 

The Book Thief is particularly interesting because it’s from the point of view of Death telling a story, not about the Jews or the Nazis, but about normal Germans during the time of the Third Reich and the Second World War. It was hard for these people, and many of them lost children to a cause they didn’t even believe in. We need more books just like this one about various histories of our species. It’s important that we can shift our paradigms as we come to know more about other people throughout the world, and the stories they have to tell. 

I was waxing a couple weeks back about how we have few books of literary quality for younger readers since the rise Mr. Harry Potter, and it’s increasingly difficult to get a book published that’s not cover-to-cover pulp fiction like Dan Brown or Nora Roberts. My friend asked me if there was anything I had read recently that could be regarded as higher literature, and The Book Thief was the first that came to mind.

There are so many amazing elements throughout The Book Thief, but I don’t want to ruin the experience. Just know that I will henceforth regard it as one of the best books written in the past ten years, and it will affect me moving forward in the same profound way that The Great Gatsby or A Wrinkle In Time have (both of which I read as a child). I recommend it to all readers 12+.