Set during World War II in Germany, Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel shares stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. Unabridged. 8 CDs.

Reviews

Death, "a companionable if sarcastic fellow," narrates this sophisticated novel set in small-town Germany during WWII. "It's a measure of how successfully Zusak has humanized these characters that even though we know they are doomed, it's no less devastating when Death finally reaches them," PW wrote in a starred review. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Gr 9 Up-Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book-although she has not yet learned how to read-and her foster father uses it, The Gravedigger's Handbook, to lull her to sleep when she's roused by regular nightmares about her younger brother's death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayor's reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesel's story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

"Brilliant and hugely ambitious...Some will argue that a book so difficult and sad may not be appropriate for teenage readers...Adults will probably like it (this one did), but it's a great young-adult novel...It's the kind of book that can be life-changing, because without ever denying the essential amorality and randomness of the natural order, "The Book Thief" offers us a believable hard-won hope...The hope we see in Liesel is unassailable, the kind you can hang on to in the midst of poverty and war and violence. Young readers need such alternatives to ideological rigidity, and such explorations of how stories matter. And so, come to think of it, do adults." -"New York Times, "May 14, 2006
""The Book Thief" is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader's mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but "The Book Thief" deserves a place on the same shelf with "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's "Night." It seems poised to become a classic."
- "USA Today"
"Zusak doesn't sugarcoat anything, but he makes his ostensibly gloomy subject bearable the same way Kurt Vonnegut did in "Slaughterhouse-Five" with grim, darkly consoling humor."
- "Time Magazine"
"Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and important."
- "Kirkus Reviews," Starred
"This hefty volume is an achievement...a challenging book in both length
and subject..."
- "Publisher's Weekly," Starred
"One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years."
- "The Wall Street Journal"
"Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour
de force to be not just read but inhabited."
- "The Horn Book Magazine," Starred
"An extraordinary narrative."
- "School Library Journal," Starred
""The Book Thief" will be appr