Book Review: The Book Thief

Book: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Source: Library

Description:

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.




Rating: 1 star (Did Not Finish)

Review:

This book was really awful. The story and the characters were extremely boring. The author was trying too hard to make this complex and deep yet it was the complete opposite. And what's with the distracting and annoying bold-faced sentences that interrupted the story. This was very choppy and made it hard for the story to flow.

I had heard so many good reviews about this book and it surprised me that I did not enjoy it. This was so boring and it's hard to imagine all the hype that this book has received. I just decided to stop reading it.

This agonizingly slow moving story follows Death as he describes everything that is going on as he tells The Book Thief's story. Which it was a huge problem for me, because this book did too much telling and not enough showing. The narrator isn't supposed to tell you the whole story, they are there only to jump in from time to time to move the story along. This story constantly told you random details and unimportant information.

I also thought the dry writing didn't give the reader a way to get to know the characters. They appeared as card board cutouts instead of developed characters.

I found the writing was really boring and the story felt disjointed. A book should not feel like a chore to read. This was a slow moving boring story that left me in want of a more well written story. Sad to say this elicited no emotion from me because the writing was so bad. I found myself not caring what happened.

I still don't understand how this book received so many top reviews. This was truly a very poorly written mediocre book. There was nothing deep or interesting about this story. The Holocaust felt like a backdrop as well as a gimmick for the story.

This was another book I'm glad I checked out from the library instead of buying.