Friday, June 12, 2009

The Book Thief

Finally, I finished "The Book Thief," it felt like it took forever to read and not because it was a bad book, in fact it was quite a good book to be sure. Neither was it an oustandingly long book, I just haven't had much time to read lately, plus the weather is nice and it is always more fun to be outside so I get distracted.

A book narrated by "death" doesn't sound like it would be a winner, Nor does it sound like it would be very hopeful. People die in this book to be sure. In some cases the reader knows early on that the character will be dead by the end of the book. This is unusual in that most authors don't allow the reader this kind of insider information. There are other mysteries though regarding who will live and who will die and who will test the bound of wartime dictates and who will succomb to them. The grains of hope are tiny and scattered throughout the narrative in such a way that the reader is able to take these gestures in full measure and forget, for a moment, the despair.

Unique also to this book is that it is told from the German perspective during WWII. Maybe that isn't completely true, because many of the characters in this story do not uphold the prevailing "German perspective" during WWII. That is where the hope comes in and kindness, there is plenty of that as well.

In this book I love the definitions. The definitions of words, motives, points of view, and people really bring the reader into the story. This is one of the best novels about WWII that I have read because it is so panoramic and at the end of the war, there truly are no winners.

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