The Book Thief

I liked this book. I really liked the perspective from which the book was taken. The Book Thief was written, through the eyes of Death, about a German girl, during the Holocaust. Did you get all that? How many stories do you read that follow the German through the Holocaust? That's what I was thinking...Anyway it's not just about how that part of the story was different. Lets talk about Death. I read someone's blog earlier, maybe Paige? and she wrote about picturing death as the grim reaper from Family Guy. This wasn't the case, I pictured him as an angel, maybe the only thing dark or punk on him would be a lip ring with a chain wallet. He was soft!!! How many characters playing Death are actually sympathetic. I can think back to the Christmas Carol and the the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future... Depending on which version you watched (not the Muppet Christmas Carol or Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol), those dudes weren't pleasant people. I mean, if you think about it in depth, they really were worried about Scrooge's demeanor but weren't overly sympathetic. Along with the three ghosts... we can talk about Paige's grim reaper, what a scary dude!!!! All of these characters fail to parallel with the narrator of The Book Thief.

Talking about our German girl, Liesel, and how we are following her throughout this story and not some Jewish person is a different choice of perspective. Growing up, the two supplemental materials that were offered with the Holocaust were The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. Each of these novels were from a Jewish persons perspective. With The Book Thief being published in 2005 and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas having been published in 2006, these texts lend a different perspective to the reading audience.

So the question is... Do I use this book in my classroom????? It will take a lot of coaxing to get a middle school, heck even high school student to read a book over 500 pages that isn't leisure... However, even though it took me a solid 100 pages to get into the book and get through, what I thought was a drawn out way to set the story and all of its characters, I liked the book. I feel that it had plenty of teachable moments. This book can obviously be paired to a World War II Unit and possibly be split up into group projects to see the different perspectives of the four books I mentioned earlier. But again, the book is long, I read more pages in this book than I read in all of my classes combined in high school. Not saying that every high school student is going to be like me, in fact I hope they are not, but this is asking a lot from students at their age to read and analyze, especially with all of the other work high school students do.

So I will leave you with this... I am going to relate this book to a movie, not one that anyone else might have picked up on... I related Death to the movie "The Sixth Sense." Bruce Willis is the main character throughout who follows this poor young boy, "Who see's dead people." It takes Bruce until the end of the film to realize that he is dead!!! I see Death hovering over Leisel like Bruce did over the little man in the Sixth Sense. I also thought of this because, while most of us probably picked up on the whole narrator being Death, I for one missed that for a good part of the beginning part of the story. With that being said, who's to say that our high school students might miss that concept. I dunno, it's a stretch, but a thought.