Love in the Library: THE BOOK THIEF

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beautiful and devastating, The Book Thief is also wonderfully different.  It's so creative that it's a bit tough at first, the narrator talking to himself, to you, telling the story.  Zusack writes like he thinks - not stream of consciousness (mercifully) but with phrases so exact, that capture so precisely, they are better than their grammatically perfect counterparts.  To write them correctly would be to take away their power.  Zusack doesn't do that, and I think that's the mark of a great writer.  That language can be art, can have power of its own, is the truth of The Book Thief.  It's true in the story the book is telling, and it's true in the words the book uses to tell it.

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