The Book Thief is about WWII Germany. A girl named Liesel arrives at her foster parents’ home when she’s nine years old. On the trip there, she lost a brother to tuberculosis and gained a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, stolen from the snow at his burial. As Liesel grows, she learns. First to read, then to hide, then to experience life and death. This era is a terrible one for the world, and many aspects of the war are explored. Hiding Jews. Bombings. The Russian front. Poverty. Hitler. All narrated by Death.

I know I’m going to get slammed for saying so, but this book didn’t really impress me. Sure, the last fifty pages made me tear up ever so slightly, but it’s rough reading material, and unless the author did a horrendous job – and Zusak didn’t – I imagine anything about this subject would make me tear up. But this book simply can’t compare to other books I’ve read about the holocaust. Night by Elie Wiesel. The Diary of Anne Frank. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. In comparison, this book feels…gimmicky. There’s no other word for it. I didn’t mind Death being the narrator, though that should have given me the first clue that it would be gimmicky, but the amount of times the fourth wall is broken, and the repetitive breaking into the novel with the whole bold/stars format really ground on my nerves after awhile. I just wanted to read the story! The story itself was beautiful. It didn’t need all the “cleverness” to spruce it up.

It’s so hard to get noticed in today’s writing world. So many people work so hard to be clever that their stories start ebbing away, losing meaning. That’s how this felt to me. I won’t say it’s bad. Millions of people love this book. Maybe I just read it at the wrong time in my life. Maybe my expectations were just too high because of all the praise I’ve heard. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t get into it. It was kind of dull. Until the last 50 pages, and in a 550 page book, that’s not good.