The Book Thief

Hey guys!

I am here again willing to tell you all my thought about a new book. Today I will be talking about The Book Thief, a book that unfortunately disappointed me. I was expecting so much from this book because all the hype that it has, but it was not a book for me. I consider this novel to be just “meh”.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak was published back in 2005. And as I have just said I have high expectations for this book and the reality didn’t live up to those. I found some great things in the book and some that are not so great. I mean I only really enjoyed the last 100 pages, meaning that my obsession with no leaving books in the middle is justified.

This story takes place during the Second World War and we follow Liesel a little girl that moves into a little town near München. She lives with a family that adopted her. During the novel we follow the live of the characters and I don’t want to tell much more: first because there is no much left to tell and second because of spoilers.

I think I should star by saying that I don’t like when spoilers are made to me. I don’t like when in the first 100 pages the narrator tells me what´s going to happen. I don’t think that in a story that is so much driven by the characters as this one is something that works well. That made me not be curious about what wold happen next.

I haven’t enj0oyt the writing either. This is the first book that I read by Marcus Zusak, but I don’t think that I will be reading any other of his works. I haven’t liked the choice of the Death as a narrator. Of course, is something new, but is not well done in my opinion. Also, I haven’t enjoyed the humour; I consider it to be quite dark. Plus, the little notes that the Death is costly making during the narration make the story to be way slower than it actually was.

The death is the narrator as I have already said, and this make hard to identify who the protagonist is. There are some parts in which you think that the protagonist is Liesel, but then you come to think that you are mistaken, and that the protagonist is the Death. And I didn’t like Death as a character, I found her to be rather macabre.

Regarding the rest of the characters of the book I have mixed feelings. So, I really like, Hans for instance; and some of them just felt plain to me, as is the case of Liesel, I mean I didn’t even care for her.

When reading this book, I felt like the author completely forgot about all the scale of greys. There is no single character that has any doubts about their personality. The “good boys” are extremely good and the “bad boys” are extremely bad and the reason is just because. I know that this book is about a very sad period in the recent history, but I honestly think that some things are taken to the extreme in order to make you hate Hitler, thing that I found to be not necessary, because we all know what happened. I think is a book for younger readers and I think that the author is not correct in the way he expresses certain things.

Finally, I don’t think that this book makes a correct portrait of the Germans, mostly for what I mention of taking the things to extremes. I am not German myself, but I have lived there, and I don’t think that German people is as is written in this book. Maybe it´s that we are talking about different generations, but I think that is more related to the way characters are portrayed

However, I can totally understand why everyone keep saying that this book is amazing. I consider the last 100 pages to be a master piece and the reason why I don’t quite books until I am done with them. And I think the last 100 pages are only as good as they are because of the rest of the story, but the other 400 pages were boring.

To sum up, I think that this book has some issues as I have mentioned but I can understand why people like it. However, I haven’t connected with the book as I would have liked. Overall, I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars.

See you all in my next post.