The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak

One-sentence summary: Death tells the story of a girl living in WWII Nazi Germany who must start a new life without her birth family but finds a way to cope through stealing and reading books.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 9

Our favorite thing about it: The very moving story and how it was interestingly narrated by Death.

Our least favorite thing about it: The occasionally verbose writing and the lack of details in the epilogue.

Main Topics of Discussion: Death, WWII Germany, Loss, Love, Friendship, Character Development

Our favorite quote: "I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

Notes: We began by discussing how much we all enjoyed reading this book. We really enjoyed the unique perspective that Death as a narrator brought to the story. We discussed how he was presented as a neutral voice, not as a vengeful grim-reaper type. This allowed for the author to show that humans were responsible for death, not Death himself. We loved the different relationships that were formed over the course of the story. Rudy and Liesel was our favorite although most of us did not read their relationship as romantic even though we wanted it to read like that. We also discussed at length the relationships of Liesel and Papa, Liesel and Mama and Liesel and Max. We loved how Rosa’s (mama) character really developed from a one-sided view to a more whole and multi-faceted view. We discussed how we loved some of the metaphors the author used to describe things, which brought very vivid images to mind. We also discussed how the words of Hitler were over-written by papa’s paint on two occasions – on the door of the Jewish store as well as on the pages of Mein Kampf. We all thought that the scene of the bombing of Himmel Street near the end of the book was by far the most moving part of the story as well as the most well-written part of the book.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We were able to speak with Amberly for a few minutes after dinner and we had a huge Christmas Celebration! We found out the gender of Lindsay’s baby through her special dessert cake. We played Becky’s Book Club Jeopardy and Lindsay won!