This is a book about a child, but it is not a children’s book. “The Book Thief” is about WWII, told by Death. He whispers to you, telling the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl living in Germany trying to cope in a world with that possesses so much good and so much evil.

And she does.

She finds love in her foster father as he sits with her every night chasing the nightmares away with his accordion, in her physically and verbally abusive foster mother, in the Jew living in her basement  whose life was saved by Mein Kampf, and in her best friend, Rudy, the blond-haired boy who wants nothing more than to be Jesse Owens.

However,  Death also whispers of the darker side of WWII, of how the Jewish man went away one day and came marching back in a long line of people as Liesel screamed his name, and how one day Liesel screamed the name of everybody else she knew, too, as her home burned.

Though tragic, “The Book Thief” is above all a beautiful and elegant novel about a period that was anything but. It doesn’t soften the blows, it doesn’t attempt to hide anything, and you will love it for that.