Book #78: The Book Thief

Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak

I'd heard raves about this novel, and was eager to plunge into it. I picked it up at a busy time in my life, and was sort of disappointed when I didn't lose myself in it-- it's a young adult novel, after all, it shouldn't have been so hard to get into it, right? But at our book club discussion I found that several of the other readers found the first couple hundred pages less than engaging (it's long!). I felt amply rewarded for pressing through, however. Zusak's book seems a testament to me that books written for teenagers don't have to be less literary or less challenging than books written for adults. I loved Zusak's imagery and fell in love with the characters. While it's a book about a difficult subject (WWII and the Holocaust) and many of the characters meet their ends in the course of the story, it also felt like a hopeful book.