The Book Thief by Makus Zusak

Sometimes book recommendations go right. Eric, after putting up some resistance, finally read Life of Pi on my recommendation and liked it as much as I thought he would, and I in turn agreed with his assessment of Atonement after he raved about it and then gave it to me for Christmas last year. But then again, sometimes recommendations go wrong. Kelsey insists that Wuthering Heights is a very good book, one of her favorites, but for the life of me I cannot get through it. And the great tragedy of my book-recommending career is the fact that after a genuine effort, she and my mom both have distasteful memories of Cry the Beloved Country, one of only two books out of the hundreds I’ve read that I love enough to call an all-time favorite.

That’s not to say that my tastes line up more with Eric’s than with Kelsey’s—I could point to books Kelsey and I both have liked (she gets all the credit for introducing me to Holes) or books that Eric and I disagreed about. The point is that when we read, we’re not just reading a book. No matter how well or poorly the book is written, we’re bringing with us all our own experiences, memories, interests, circumstances, expectations, and personal tastes, and this is inevitably going to affect our reading of the book. So I’m always a little hesitant about recommending books because I know that when you read it, you’re not going to have the same experience I did. And that might mean you don’t like it as much. I’m especially hesitant when the book strikes me at a particularly deep level, because I’m putting myself on the line. If you read this most amazing, life-changing book, and then you shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh, it was all right,” that might devalue my own experience.

But you know, it doesn’t really devalue my experience. And sometimes when something hits you hard enough, you just have to tell someone else. So I’m going to go out on a limb here, because this book made me cry. Really cry. And I want to tell you about it.

I should qualify that by explaining that when I wept my way through the last 20 pages I was probably due for a good cry anyway—it was 10 o’clock at night at the end of a long day and I was feeling a bit emotionally drained as it was. But even so, books don’t usually make me cry—tear up, perhaps, but not out-loud, tissue-grabbing waterworks like this, and once I started I couldn’t stop. Every paragraph got me. I fell asleep last night trying to figure out exactly what set me off, and the conclusion I came to was that the book was that good.

A description of the story sounds like a dozen or so clichés thrown together in a large pot and stirred—a spunky, preadolescent orphaned heroine, her best-friend/partner-in-crime/potential-first-love, a Jew hidden in the basement in Nazi Germany, the power of books to bring hope and assurance in a time of hardship—but what comes out of the mix is anything but a cliché. The highest compliment that I can give to a book is that it feels real, and that is the best way I can think to describe The Book Thief. It has been a long time since I have felt so invested in the lives of the characters of a book, and I loved it.

And yet the reality of the book stems, strangely, from an almost fanciful narrative device. The story is told by Death. That sounds odd at first, but from the very beginning it feels very natural. It is Death’s ability to be in many places at once that allows the narrative to flow smoothly and subtly from the intimate and personal lives of the characters to the broad and wonderful and horrifying experience of mankind in general in the early years of the 1940s, and to do it in such a way that these vastly different perspectives seem one and the same. The voice of Death is both sensory and straightforward, insightful and perplexed, and when I began crying near the end, I was crying not for and through the main character, Liesel, but because what I saw through the eyes of Death. This strange narrator felt as real to me by the end as the human characters. The book is not just what is told, but the way it's told.

I won’t write more because I don’t want to give away the experience, but I’ll say without hesitation that this is quite possibly the best young adult book I have ever read. The book was easy to enter, and hard to leave. In fact, I think I am still there.