The story of a young girl in Nazi Germany.

Oh dear, I can see this review is gonna get messy! You see, the trouble is, I read this book because it came so incredibly highly recommended. It’s one of those books where people say ‘this is one of the all-time best reads of my life!’ So I figured I just had to read it. After all, I ttend to like books which my friends like, so I thought it was a sure-fire hit.

But no. Sadly, trusted friends, I have to say I hated it. The whole book drove me almost bananas with frustration … but I persevered bravely as I was determined not to abandon it half-way through.

Why, I hear you cry, didn’t I like it?

Well, to keep this post to a manageable length, I’ll stick to just a few of the reasons

1. Narrative perspective. It’s not that I have a problem with stories narrated by death … no true Terry Pratchett fan can have a problem with death showing up as a character … but in this case it really didn’t work (in my humble opinion). It didn’t seem to add anything – except the opportunity for some truly pretentious and disfunctional metaphores. If anything, it served the unfortunate purpose of detaching the reader from the story – which might have been OK if the characters had been well-drawn and likable, but since they weren’t particularly, it merely served to make the whole read an even less sympathetic experience than it could have been.

2. So, back to that pretentious language. I usually love creative, unusual descriptions, but there really does have to be something relatively clever or relevant about them. It’s not OK just to randomly describe something in an odd way for the sake of it. It is, for instance, not OK just to say, as Mr. Zusak does, that ‘the kitchen cupboards were the shape of guilt’. What on earth does *that* mean???!!!

3. The main character and her best friend just made me want to leave this land and flee as far away from Germany as possible Irritating in the extreme! The father was the only truly likable character really, but I ended up pitying him rather than liking him

4. The German translations drove me batty. I take the point that not everyone understands German, but surely we didn’t need the supposedly helpful:
“Ja!” (“Yes!”) line.
When you’re reading a book set in a different culture and language, you get used to not necessarily understanding every word of the slang or catchphrases, but you get the gyst surely, don’t you? To insist on translating every word is just petty and interrupts the flow.

5. OK, I have to own up that part of my dislike of the book may have come from the particular way it was narrated in audiobook form. There are certain conventions you employ when narrating books. One of them is that you generally use the narrator’s voice for the main character – that is to say, you use either your own voice, or the accent in which you are reading the main text of the book. You don’t give the main character a different voice, because that creates unhelpful narrative distance. And you certainly don’t give the main character a stupidly cartoonised German accent. Now, I take your point that the girl isn’t the main character – death is. But in order to enjoy the book (if that is possible), you do need to engage sympathetically with the girl, and that is made very difficult by said whiny cartoon voice.
And for that matter, all the characters were rendered in over-exaggerated, ‘Heil Hitler’ voices … which made you want to throw the book into the nearest river.

So, all in all, I found I couldn’t really care less whether the book thief thieved books, or why for that matter … and this book has to be the first one where I have truly not cared whether the main character (or any of the others for that matter) lived or died.