The Book Thief is a captivating and thrilling book. With an incredibly strong plot, as well as some fascinating characters, Markus Zusak has created a masterpiece. Zusak combines familiar elements from a myriad popular books and then adds his own flavor. His narrator for the story, Death, resembles the mysterious narrator of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’, and the main character, Leslie, has elements of popular characters such as Harry Potter and Bod from ‘The Graveyard Book’.

Set in World War II Nazi Germany, The Book Thief follows the story of Liesel Meminger a young, inquisitive girl. Through her experiences the reader explores the horrific atrocities committed in that era, and how a child interprets and relates to them. In order to escape her dull, boring life, Liesel starts stealing books to understand more about the world around her, which is what lends the book its strange title.

With the Holocaust and Nazism as its predominant themes, The Book Thief is upsetting and unsettling, but captivating nonetheless. In the same league as The Diary of Anne Frank, and Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, this book is a must read for young adults with an interest in historical fiction.

(Written for SmartBean by a middle school student in Palo Alto, CA)