Fabulous read! With Death as the narrator, the author views Nazi Germany through the eyes of a small town, especially Liesel Meminger who has a love affair with books begun with a act of thievery. learning to read begins with The Grave Digger's Handbook and leads her to write her own book. The writing is exquisite and the ethical questions posed by by war time alliances makes it interesting from start to finish.

To be released at the holiday gathering of BC in DC.

I grabbed this at today's BC-in-DC get together at my house. My daughter has started reading this on her Kindle, and I've heard good things about it and would like to read it before I see the movie. We promised to pass it along to SqueakyChu when we finish it.

I had heard many people comment about how good this book was, so I was looking forward to reading it. But the structure of that narration on the first two pages put me off just a little bit. I guess I wasn’t prepared for a story narrated by Death, and it took me a few pages to adjust to the prose style used here. However, I persevered beyond that initial impression and soon found this to be one of those books that is nearly impossible to put down. In the end, I think that telling this story from the point of view of Death was inspired. It feels entirely appropriate for a book set during the Second World War in Nazi Germany, where death became such a common occurrence.

The characters in this book are well developed and complex. They struggle to understand the events that have overtaken them and how they fit into the larger picture formed by the Nazi regime and its actions. This is not a perspective that we often see, the ordinary German, struggling to survive and live, trying to understand what is going on around them. This story doesn’t answer the big questions about the abundant evils of the Nazis, nor does it try. Instead, it tries to place us inside the world created by the twisted Nazi ideology, and we discover that life for the ordinary person was, as always, primarily about survival. There is some good and some bad, but mostly there are shades of grey in between.

In the midst of all this death and evil, life goes on…children play and learn, parents love and teach, spouses quarrel and make up. The title character, Liesel, arrives at the home of the Hubermanns at the beginning of the book, effectively abandoned by her mother. We get to watch as she comes to accept them as her new parents and grow to love them. And we come to understand that these are simple, but good people, who ultimately are willing to risk their very lives to do what they believe is right. Liesel also forms a close bond with Rudy, the boy next door, and together, they have adventures and get into trouble, and generally do the things that children do.

Through it all, Liesel comes to understand and appreciate the power of words. Her books bring her and those around her great comfort, but words are also what propelled Hitler into power and enabled him to cause so much death and destruction. There is a powerful insight in this realization, and this book does a terrific job of gradually laying it before the reader. Well written, deeply insightful, and powerfully emotional, this is a book that will be with me for a long time to come.

I'll pass this along to my daughter to read next. When she finishes with it, we'll pass it along to SqueakyChu.

My daughter just returned this book to me. I'll check to see if SqueakyChu is still interested in this.

I just checked with SqueakyChu, and she already read another copy of this book, so she no longer needs me to save this copy for her, so I'll set it aside to release elsewhere.

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I'm not sure how much I can add after the other reviews. I thought the book was excellent. It exposes the horrors of war and the slaughter of the Jews, but from the point of view of "death." The book was written in a down-to-earth and sometime humorous way. The only thing I would have liked to have known was what happened to Liesel's mother and if she searched for her after the war.