Book Report: The Book Thief

When you pick up a book and it is set in Nazi Germany you already have a decent idea of what it is about. However, there was something unique about The Book Thief. It had a strange point of view that wasn’t present in any other book I had read before.

The Book Thief grabs your attention from the beginning. It takes a situation in Germany during World War II and wraps it around the life of a poor, young girl, Liesel Meminger. Liesel has no father and has just watched her brother die en route for the strange place where her mother would leave her with people she had never met. However, The Book Thief does not stop there. The next variation in the story jumps out at you in the beginning and is the most surprising.
The narrator of The Book Thief is Death, who found himself busier than usual at that time. Death makes the whole incident suspenseful by continuously hinting about what is going to happen next, since he is telling the story from the present as he looks back at the past. Another way that Death is able to tell the book so well is the fact that, during World War II and the Nazi era in Germany, many people were dieing all over, which made it so that death found himself in many vantage points to write a book set in that time. He was there during key points in Liesel life (her brother’s death, a neighbor’s death, and the wipeout of her whole neighborhood including her foster family who she loved as her own). He also writes about being there when Liesel dies of old age in Australia, years after World War II ended, holding her soul in his arms and learning about Liesel’s life from her point of view. These two viewpoints make Death the most interesting character in The Book Thief.