One day, Death met a thief...

Of the books that I've read lately, Markus Zusak's unconventional 2005 novel The Book Thief has stood out for a couple of reasons. It's the only book that I've read twice in the same year, both being for book groups. I liked it the first time around, and the second go through didn't diminish my regard for it (a rare occurance, believe me). Secondly, I noticed that between the two groups, opinion was decidely divided. In the first group, all pretty much agreed that it was excellent. The second was considerably cooler, most choosing to skim parts that annoyed, and most weren't willing to pass it on to another reader.

Why the divide? On the surface, The Book Thief is something of a hard sell. It's a 500+ page teen novel about Germans during WWII, narrated by Death, relies on images to tells stories within the story, and oh, yes, you'll know from page one how everything is going to turn out. It seems a perfect recipe for a dark and depressing slog in the hands of a lesser writer, but Zusak, on the whole, makes it work. The story centers on Liesel, a gangly, neglected girl on the cusp of adolescence. She is on the way to her foster parents in a Munich suburb when our narrator first meets her, catching her stealing an abandoned book at the freshly dug gravesite of her brother. Her thievery continues as she grows up in the home of Rosa and Hans Hubermann, loving, if unconventional, parents who foster her love of reading. Liesel and her best friend, the Jesse Owens obsessed Rudy, seem to have as usual a childhood as most other kids, but the casual mention of Hitler youth meetings gives way to the images of Jews forced to march through town, pushing Liesel and those close to her to make a potentially life threatening choice between right and wrong.

With Death continually interrupting the story, there's little doubt as to the ending for at least some of the characters. Zusak, rightly, gives Death a wearily ironic tone (could he have any other?) and the narrator's constant interruption of the story can be grating for some. More jarring is Zusak's occassionally ungrammatical writing ('the horizon was beginning to charcoal') and his tendency towards forced descriptions ('cluttered breath', 'shrouded in his uniform as the graying light armwrestled the sky'). This strikes me as contrived, and it's hard to imagine any middle or high schooler keeping themselves from snickering at that florid stuff. But I kept thinking as I read that the effect of such language gives The Book Thief a cinematic sheen; like film, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief to make it work. Then it's not too hard to conjure not just the images Zusak is portraying, but to feel what it would be like to live on Himmel Street with Liesel. It's an ambitious novel, and even if it sometimes it doesn't quite live up to its own expectations, I'd fall into the group that would pass it along. What other novel mixes the mundane and the magical, the worst of human nature with humorous moments, and appeals to both teens and adults?