USA Today thinks that Markus Zusak's The Book Thief deserves a place on the shelf next to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. Time Magazine compared it to Slaughterhouse Five. I believe both of these associations to be true...if you really hate Anne Frank and Kurt Vonnegut.I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed by a book. OK, to be fair, it wasn't nearly as bad as this review is going to make it seem. Compared to all the crap that's out there, it's really pretty decent. But reading the pages of accolades that this book has received (which are conveniently located at the very beginning of this book), and then reading The Book Thief, I found myself wondering "Did the New York Times and I read the same book?"
The basic story is about a little girl (Liesel Meminger) who steals a book from her brother's gravesite. She has a foster family, a crush on the neighbor boy, and (later) a Jew named Max hiding in her basement. The story is narrated by Death, which, although initially interesting, accomplished nothing.
Now I'm going to play the Finish The Sentence game.
The Book Thief is...
...200 pages too long.
...embarrassingly under-researched (the whole thing feels like it's set during a movie of the World War II rather than the actual war)
...heavy-handed.
...full of the kind of effortful language that I imagine Markus Zusak writing, and then smiling a smug little smile at his capacity for profound and poetic metaphor.
...repetitive and ultimately kind of boring.
...mistitled, because Liesel really doesn't steal that many books. Two at most, and that's using a pretty liberal definition of "stealing."
Maybe I'm just cranky. Or completely missing the point. I would really be interested in talking to someone who loved this book, because I fail to understand what all the hooplah is about.
Final Review: 4/10
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