It’s not often I see the movie version of a story and then proceed to the book. Off the top of my head, I actually can’t think of another example, but I just did that with Markus Zusak’s “The Book Thief.”
For most books, having seen the movie would provide too many spoilers to fully enjoy the written version. Sure, there are plenty of pieces left out, but you know the highlights and especially the ending.
This story was different. I knew the ending when I flipped to page 1, and that was okay, since the narrator, Death, pretty much tells you the end right from the start.
Death turns out to be a really great narrator and should definitely keep up that line of work. The main focus of the book is Liesel Meminger, a young girl whose mother gives her up to an older couple in Nazi Germany. Liesel is the ultimate protagonist you root for and the actress that plays her in the movie, Sophie Nelisse, is downright perfect.
Death takes us through dual storylines involving Liesel and a man named Max, which are destined to come together, and he handles our expectations of the merger appropriately.
“The juggling comes to an end now, but the struggling does not. I have Liesel Meminger in one hand, Max Vandenburg in the other. Soon, I will clap them together. Just give me a few pages.”
Death is busy at this time in history and uses his unique position to relate Liesel’s world and the wider one around her in a way that takes a perspective outside of a human body.
“You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little,” the narrator says. “They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls. A few bombs usually do the trick.”
As the bombs fall throughout Europe, Liesel wants nothing more than to read, and to do that she needs books. Wartime in a poor family is not the ideal set of conditions to acquire said texts, so, as the title suggests, she is fond of stealing. Her most frequent target is the house of her town’s mayor, in a library kept by his wife.
One of her selections involved motivations straight out of “Billy Madison,” who tells his teacher he drew a blue duck in class because he had never seen a blue duck before.
“Typically, many of the titles tempted her, but after a good minute or two in the room, she settled for A Song in the Dark, most likely because the book was green, and she did not yet own a book of that color.”
For all the evil in the book, which should be expected when your narrator is Death, the story has an overwhelming balance of showing the good in people and what happens when you take the time to care.
Death sums it up.
“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”