The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
Published by Australian author Marcus Zusak in 2005, The Book Thief is a historical fiction set in Nazi Germany during WWII, narrated by the personification of death, which tells the story of an orphan girl named Liesel adopted by German parents in 1939. Escaping persecution due to being Communist, her mother is forced to give her daughter and son up for adoption in the hopes they will be safe. Her brother dies at the train station on the way, and starving Liesel finds her new home on Heaven Street with her new foster parents Rosa and Hans shortly after. Discovering he plays the accordion, Liesel becomes at ease with her foster father quickly and describes him playing the accordion as if he was breathing life into it, demonstrating the childhood creativity and imagination she has throughout the novel in her descriptions.The novel follows the course of her life as she comes face to face with obstacles such as Hitler youth, school bullies, making new friends and family, coming to terms with her family’s past and her mother’s decision, the persecution of her town’s Jews, and most importantly, she faces the struggle of learning to read and write at an older age among her advanced level peers at school. Making her a chalkboard in which to write down new words she has learned, Leisel’s foster father Hans helps her to learn to read and understand the world unfolding around her through various different books. After attending a book burning of Jewish and other non-German authors at Hitler youth, Liesel steals a book and reads it in secret. The mayor’s wife, seeing her pick up the book from the ashes from the window of a car, invites Liesel into her gargantuan library, seemingly unmolested from the burning of the schools and institutions books, to read whenever she pleased.
Throughout the novel, Liesel uses the words she has “stolen” to think critically of the world around her and her place in it, specifically in regards to antisemitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. She learns lessons such as forgiveness, passion, humbleness, and how to combat the immense hate going on around her at school and with her friends through reading books that are forbidden, which allows her to expand her mind and not be manipulated by Nazi propaganda as she learns the powerful force that words have on us. I read this book when I was a teenager, and still read it often as it offers a powerful message regarding the power of words and how they can be used to both hurt and help people. Along with Liesel, by learning the gravity of words and the social context of the world around her, her anger with her mother changes to understanding, and changes to anger with the man responsible for her mother and father’s persecution, her country’s perceived hero at the time, Adolf Hitler. Through the power of words and love from her foster father, Liesel can see through the propaganda taught to her at hitler youth, and has a much more robust and nuanced understanding of the police nature of her country than kids her age do. She grows to become thoughtful, kind, empathetic, creative, and immensely smart because of all she has learned by reading and learns how words can be used for the betterment of everyone. I truly recommend this book; it has a unique prose, is a lesson-filled coming of age tale, all taking place in Nazi Germany in WWII to demonstrate the power of words and reading in understanding life’s obstacles and grievances, and often, our role in either perpetuating or resolving these problems.