This book hurts.

I don't know why I never read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak- I'd certainly heard a lot about it. Maybe it was my being guilty of judging the book by its cover that wasn't exactly suggesting "my type" of book or maybe it was the specific people that had recommended it to me whose opinion I didn't trust or value or believe that I'd agree with or the concept of death as a narrator I'd heard about that implied an ironic black humor sort of book- definitely not my taste. But then with about a month left before starting high school, I had the novel idea of going online to check for any summer assignments that should have been already completed. And lo and behold, I was supposed to have read The Book Theif. At first, this was a burden seeing as though I wasn't keen on the idea of the book in the first place and being long, it rather interupted my other nerdy reading plans for the last few weeks of summer. However, though I expected to have to force myself to pick it up and read in order to ever finish, it turned out that I rather had to to force myself to put it down for a a 20-minute meal break every once in a while. I devoured the book, often reading a few hundred pages in one sitting. This may have had something to do with the fact that, while reading it, I had two nine hour flights between Alaska and New York on which I couldn't fall asleep and only read/wrote for hours on end. But whatever the reason, those 552 pages flew by far faster than I ever could have imagined.

Set in Germany during the 1940's, you know that this book hurts without me even having to even say it. It revolves around Liesel Meminger- a young German girl- and her learning about, then shortly after falling in love with words, books, writing. She is a girl who goes through more in ten years than anyone should have to endure in a lifetime. Her story is narrated by death- a character who helps you see into people in a way that no one else could. He, while collecting souls of the dead throughout the world in a time when there seems to be more to collect than ever before, follows Liesel through her childhood, often revealing what will happen or who he will visit next, long before it takes place in the story. The language is beautiful, every moment is poetic, and each image is strong.

So I have forewarned you- this book hurts. It hurts simply because of its setting and its protagonists struggles. It hurts because death is the narrator who tells you what will happen before it does which makes a different kind of pain. It is no longer a quick shock that stabs your heart. No, it's suddenly slow and excruciating. It is waiting for what you know is coming, watching around every corner of every page for it to come. It is standing by and knowing what the characters you love don't, it is wanting to tell them and not being able to, wishing to scoop them up out of the story and save them, but you can't. Like things so often are, though, what makes this hurt the most is also why it's so beautiful- the characters and how you are able to see into them. Because this isn't an ordinary book with 2-dimensional, rather undefined supporting characters. There is so much depth, not only in Liesel, but in her mama who curses like no ones business and her papa who plays the accordian better than anyone ever could and in the young jewish man that they hide in their basement who lives to hear her weather reports and her friend Rudy who wants to be Jesse Owens and in the mayor's wife and the angry woman next door who spits on her door step. There is depth even in the boy that they steal apples with and a kid from school named Tommy and the stern nazi who owns the candy store. Every single character is endearing and good somewhere, every single characters finds a little crack in your heart to wedge themselves into. Even death. And that hurts so much, somehow, because when you find yourself loving so much, you suddenly have worlds more to loose, immense amounts of more potential pain to be caused.

This post has done the book no justice and barely began to organize or complete my thoughts on it, but I don't think that I'll ever really be able to do that. It is one of the most endearing, original, haunting, and heartbreaking books that I have ever read. I cannot find words for it.