PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleIt's a 552-page story about the Holocaust, written from the point of view of Death ... In The Book Thief, Death is the narrator, but a young girl — a book thief — is the central character ... As the story builds, Zusak deftly ties in historical bits to the narrative. Using the omnipresent voice of Death allows him to skip around in time and space ... Zusak's writing is at times marred by some postmodern tricks — inserting asides in boldface, some cloying commentary by Death — but, overall, his style is lyrical and moving ... Zusak has done a useful thing by hanging the story on the experience of a German civilian, not a camp survivor, and humanizing the choices that ordinary people had to make in the face of the Führer. It's unlikely young readers will forget what this atrocity looked like through the eyes of Death.
