Review: Boktjuven

Boktjuven by Markus Zusak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Usually when I mark a book as being read, one or maybe two of my goodreads friends will have read it, and more often than not our opinions on said book will differ a lot (I'll 3 star what they 5 stared, and vice versa): with this book it seemed everyone had either read it or marked it as to read, and even more surprising was that EVERYONE gave it 4 or 5 stars. I had heard good things about it, but that was still unexpected.

And wholly understandable, now that I've finished. Pro-tip: don't read the last 30 pages or so on the subway on your way home. I will consider not full out bawling there one of my major achievements in life, though not gonna lie, tears were involved.

It's just so good. So well-told. I had heard about Death being the narrator, of course, but I didn't realize what that meant until I started reading and realized that oohh, Death IS literally narrating, and telling us the story of the book thief. I liked Death, but then again I am a big fan of personifications of Death in fiction in general. This was a nice one.

And there's a great story that Death's telling. About love and family and friendship and books and nazi-Germany and all the horrors that came with it. We see people side with the nazis, people who are even friends with the main characters, almost family, but the narrative NEVER makes this okay, never says that what they believed were right. It just depicts how it was, how some people were horrible indeed but some weren't, but it never says that the horrible people had any right to be that way.

It's long, yes, but it was still very easy to read and I could make it through 40-50 pages just on my 20 minute commute to work, so it does not feel like it's almost 600 pages long, in case anyone was wondering.

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True story.