THE BOOK THIEF (by Markus Zusak)

This is the story of a little blonde girl in a Munich suburb. Her name is Liesel Meminger. Adopted by a gentle painter named Hans and his resilient wife, Rosa, Liesel weathers the horrors of war through words. The first words she reads are snatched from an instruction book on grave digging. Later words spill from a singed Nazi bonfire, the mayor’s library, and pages altered by a deathly sick Jew hidden in her foster family’s basement. Many of the words are stolen. For Liesel the need to learn to read is far more than the means to pleasurable escapism, it is a driving force in her dislocated and disturbed life as she has already suffered tragedy in the events leading to her being placed with foster parents in Munich. She is taught to read by her foster father. This shared night-time engagement is more than the process of learning a skill, it acts as a form of protection and healing from the nightmare of the traumas she has suffered which otherwise torment her sleeping hours. And as Liesel becomes emboldened with every syllable, she transforms into an icon of resilience. She steals stories from those who burn them. Or as former Paste editor Charles McNair observed, Liesel is “a trumpet blast for the power of books and words—the power of words to do good, to do bad; to raze low and raise high; to create a Hitler, and to allow a Hans Hubermann to exist". Words, in short, rule the world. The Book Thief has a theme that draws from those of The Diary of a Young Girl, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and Elie Wiesel’s Day/Night, and yet is so remarkably different. It offers an achingly beautiful portrait of hope nurtured when the world’s foes were far more oppressive than anything the most surreal fiction could conjure. The Book Thief also offers an existentially altering new scope for the genre. Death itself narrates Liesel’s journey, offering the perspective of a universal handyman exasperated by humanity’s cruelty, yet enlightened in the wake of a remarkable heroine and the lives she touches.

-Trisha Roy