The Book Thief

Bibliography

Zusak, Markus. 2005. The Book Thief. New York, NY: Knope, Borzoi Books ISBN 978-0-375-83100-3

Plot Summary

Liesel, a young girl living in Molching, Germany during WWII, has a love of books that runs so deep that she risks everything to steal them. She does not hoard these books but rather uses them to bond with others, such as her Papa, who teaches her to read, and Max, the Jew the family is hiding in the basement. These books help her cope with the travesties of war in many ways, but what she does not know is that every time she has stolen a book, one person has been watching.

Critical Analysis

Right off the bat The Book Thief will have the reader hooked because of the unusual, brutally honest and bluntly insightful narrator, Death. He tries to tell the harrowing story of Liesel and her family and friends lives "attempting to be cheerful about the whole topic" but is distantly effected by his observations. With his interesting insights, marked by stars and bold font, Death attempts to detach himself, but in his narration of the story, the reader learns as much about Death as they do about the "main character," Leisel. 

The Book Thief takes another interesting approach by basing the story more so around the life of non-Jew Germans and the effects on them than German Jews. Although Max, a Jew who is hiding in Liesel's basement, plays a major part in the story, it is focused more on how his being there impacts the family. It also emphasizes the number of Germans who did not agree with the war, but were forced to participate in it to keep their families safe, such as Liesel's father and her best friend Rudy's father. 

Review Excerpts

"The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a classic." -USA Today   


"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour de force to be not just read but inhabited." -The Horn Book Magazine


Connections
*Death describes events in colors. Have students share other stories, personal or from other books, and discuss what colors they would use to describe them and why.
*Max used pages from Mein Kampf to write a new story for Liesel. Provide students with pages from an unusable book, or recycled scrap paper, and have them use whatever supplies at hand to create a new story on it.