5 Stars
Pros: A truly unique narrator/A heartbreaking, gut wrenching, moving story that must be read to be truly understood.
Cons: Some of Zusak's descriptions were hard to imagine but it wasn't a con per se, it was just difficult to picture it in your mind. It didn't take away from the book in any way shape or form though.
Full Review:
I don't feel it's an exaggeration to say that I cannot properly find the words to describe this book. It was beautifully written, Zusak's prose takes you exactly where he wants you to go. The characters are all so important, even the minor ones and they all have a role to play. And Liesel, the protagonist, is stuck in a world that she doesn't understand and is being forced to play a role that she doesn't want to play, but as she grows and matures, she realizes that the most important people in her life are struggling through the exact same thing.
It is a story based in Nazi, Germany and Liesel is a German. The book begins with her and countless others packed into a train. It's night time and she wakes from sleep to glance over at her brother. He's been coughing for days now and it's only now, that he's silent, that she realizes something is wrong. She tries to wake him, but he is already dead. He is pulled from the train, as are she and her mother and he is buried without ceremony in a small cemetery in a nameless town.
It is there, during the last time she will see her brother and the last time she will see her mother, that she steals her first book. It's a small black book that falls out of the pocket of one of the grave diggers and she takes it without thought. She knows, as her bleeding hands can attest, that she cannot reach her brother anymore, that he is dead and in the ground, try as she might to dig to him. And as her mother leaves her on the train platform, she holds onto the small book as her one anchor, her one keepsake of the last time that she had a family.
She is sent to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Huberman, in a small town outside of Munich. And though the Jewish have already been taken from the town and are sometimes marched through the streets to the concentration camp of Dachau nearby, the Fuhrer, the Hitler Youth and the ideas of a "perfect race" are everywhere.
This book is indescribable. It's both filled with such beauty and love but also so heavily dark and fatal that it brought tears to my eyes. There are points where you don't think it could get any worse and then it does. But at the same time, there are moments of such joy, that you have to keep reading, just to see how it all turns out. I can't possibly review this book and do it justice, it's something that has to be experienced on its own.
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