Principally it is about Liesel Meminger, whose little brother dies just before Liesel's mother leaves her with foster parents in a dismal town in southern Germany (her father, a Communist, has been taken away). class, Death would doubtless be criticized for telling instead of showing.įortunately, this book isn't about Death it's about death, and so much else. His periodic soliloquies aren't the most effective moments of the novel, and if he took an M.F.A. And that's only the A's." Maybe so, but Death is so innocuous that he's not very absorbing. As Death himself puts it on : "I can be amiable. Readers are introduced to this Death-as-storyteller concept in a too-long invocation that begins "The Book Thief." This is no Grim Reaper - we have here a kinder, gentler Death, who feels sympathy for his victims. The Australian writer Markus Zusak's brilliant and hugely ambitious new young-adult novel is startling in many ways, but the first thing many teenagers will notice is its length: 552 pages! It's one thing to write a long book about, say, a boy who happens across a dragon's egg it's quite another to write a long, achingly sad, intricately structured book about Nazi Germany narrated by Death itself.
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