★★★★★

I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.
Sometimes, I imagined how everything appeared above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye.
They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

The Book Thief broke my heart. I have always and will always find books about World War II, about the Holocaust and about painful periods of history deeply moving. I think part of this comes from being an emotional person and partly from the time I have spent studying the history, reading the individual stories, visiting the museums, reading the various books about the atrocities of the past. The Holocaust in particular is a subject that I spent a whole semester studying and read books and watched films that unsettled me and will never be removed from my brain. It is a subject that Markus Zusak handled with care and with compassion. He focused on the subject without dealing directly with every single atrocity and that made this book so clever.

I know many people have previously read this book and have fallen in love, and I am very late to the game. However, I would echo what those before me have said by saying that Zusak has a way with words. The writing was enchanting and emotional. This book is over 500 pages long and at no point did it feel like a chore or a slog. I loved the interwoven snippets of dictionary definitions, handwritten stories and drawings, and conversations. The characters Liesel, Rudy, Hans and Max (especially) wormed their way into my heart and took a little piece of me with them when the book ended. This is almost certainly the kind of book that will stay with you long after reading.

I cried at many points during this book; at the cruelty of life, at the cruelty of humanity and the pain that death was able to narrate. The fact that this book was told by Death and the way in which Death explored his feelings about the senseless and continuous loss of life throughout the book only made me tear up more. It was particularly profound as Death had his own moral compass, his own compassion and care for the souls he was taking. The way Zusak brought death to life and humanised him was what really made this book so powerful to me.

I am glad I finally got to read this book, so thankful for Zusak for writing such a beautiful piece and I am sure it will stay with me for a long time to come.