Sorry this one is up a day early. 
THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak was chosen by my book group as their April selection. (In 2009)
When I learned it was a YA book, I groaned.
When I learned it was about the Second World War in Germany, I groaned again.
Then
I found out it was about a ten-year old girl orphaned and sent to live
with a foster family. Jeez, I thought. Can't we ever read a happy book?
THE
BOOK THIEF was not a happy book. But it was a highly original book-much
more so than most adult novels I read. I don't even understand why
someone classified it as YA. Is every book with a YA hero classified as
YA? But this is a book teachers might choose for teens. I think my grandson read it in seventh grade.
The narrator in THE BOOK THIEF
is Death and he tells the story from the standpoint of someone
overwhelmed with his mission during the war. Death has his hands full.
But
THE BOOK THIEF is even more the story of a young girl who loses her
family and is sent to live with a foster family in a small German town.
She can't read at first but values books greatly and collects them in
whatever way she can. Her foster father reads to her every night from
the improbable books she finds or steals. The family is kind, both to
her and to a Jewish man fleeing the Nazis who is hiding in their
basement.
This book certainly humanizes the German people. We
watch them starve, freeze and die. Certainly its portrait of Nazis is
acute. But with THE READER and this book, the trend is now to understand
the Germans were victims of Hitler and fascism too. Maybe it is time to
think about this.
It's really hard to do that though, knowing
the smell of gassed bodies was mere miles away. Still, THE BOOK THIEF is
a book worth reading.
16 comments:
Yes, it is worth reading but I certainly don't think of it as YA either.
Diane's Book Club read THE BOOK THIEF. As I recall, there was a clear split in the group. Some liked the book, others did not. From what I know about THE BOOK THIEF, it really isn't a YA book. Jeff is right.
I never wanted to read this before but you have convinced me that I should try it. I avoid YA books usually but this doesn't sound YA to me, either.
No, it really isn't. Although did we even have YA's in our distant youth.
I'm with you, Patti, about YA books. Some of them are really excellent, and tell the stories very well. I'm glad you thought this was a good one.
Well, yes, Patti, though they were tagged "juveniles" or young readers' books and the like rather than Young Adult. The Newbery Award was being awarded in the 1920s, albeit THE STORY OF MANKIND, the first winner, wasn't published for young readers explicitly, iinm, and it wouldn't be the first. My favorite Newbuery Honor Book/runner-up when I was 9yo was THE LONER, by Ester Wier (1963), which is about an orphaned and desperately lonely sharecropper boy whose first real friend, a girl whose parents are still with her, is killed in the first chapter by a rather graphically-described thresher accident, when her long hair is caught in the works. In the '4os, JOHNNY TREMAIN by Esther Forbes has his hand severely burnt by the hot silver he's working with as an indentured apprentice, which ruins him for that work but does put him on the track to become a War of Independence soldier. And you don't even want to begin with the litany of tragedy that haunts '70s YA, from the genuinely good award winners by the likes of "M. E. Kerr"/Marijane Meaker and Jean George and garbage such as HEY, DUMMY from hangers on like Kin Platt...Ian Serrailier's kids escaping the Nazis THE SILVR SWORD was another novel I was fond of in my youth (the Scholastic paperback was retitled ESCAPE FROM WARSAW).
All told, THE BOOK THIEF is solidly in the tradition...
Pardon! THE STORY OF MANKIND wouldn't be the last (not first) "adult" book appropriate for kids to gain Newbery attention--for example, Sterling North's RASCAL was the other 1964 runner-up along with Wier's THE LONER, about the pet raccoon of his youth...
And that's THE SILVER SWORD, of course...
By coincidence, I started a "juvenile" published in the Winston Science Fiction series in 1953, Evan Hunter (as by Richard Marsten)'s DANGER: DINOSAURS! This is what would have been considered YA back then, I guess. A teenage boy gets to go with his older brother, the guide for a group using the Time Slip to go back in time to the dinosaur age.
And, yes, for every Trumpista in this country, there are not a few who have suffered under the far-right tendency here in the last several decades...consider how some of the less enthusiastic Germans who were not targeted by the Nazis weren't having the time of their lives, either, along with those who were working against their own interests, at least ultimately, by their 120% support of fascists and their kind, then and now, throughout the world...not to begin to leave aside all who Were and Are targeted for scapegoating/mass murder by such thugs.
Indeed, Jeff..."juveniles" was the most common term in the '50s, at least. And Winston wasn't the only publisher cranking them out, and not solely in sf.
Some of the books mentioned were considered childrens' literature more than YA, I think, I remember my kids reading Johnny Tremain in fourth grade. The Book Thief could have been classified as adult both for its unusual "voice" and for its subject matter. Often I read books like IVANHOE at far too young an age in the fifites-sixties thus ruining it for me forever. It is a hard thing to get right. They did a better job a generation later with my kids. But my grandson is reading graphic novels (in class) rather than regular ones in 8th grade. Only a step away from comic books to the uninformed (me).
But...the better graphic novels are better than nearly all the comic books of the past, where writing tended to be dumbed down and secondary (and certainly to the visuals) except in the odd exceptions of the likes of Carl Barks or Will Eisner's work, or Walt Kelly's and Jules Feiffer's, among some less well-known examples (I forget who wrote the early clever PLASTIC MAN scripts).
And just because one reads JOHNNY TREMAIN at ten didn't mean it was a simplistic or bunnies-and-flowers kind of text! (For simple-mindedness, check the Disney film.) And see JULIE OF THE WOLVES by Jean George, mentioned above, for both voice and subject matter, and definitely incident, among early '70s YA/young readers work (as another Newbery winner, I read it at age 9, along with adult fiction in the "HITCHCOCK" books and Henry James and Shirley Jackson in my horror anthologies...)
IVANHOE might be a bit stodgy for any reader these days...I certainly "got" what Twain was getting at when reading his adult work as a kid...am surprised so many adults don't.
I asked Kevin how long the graphic novel was. It was pretty long but he said many pages just had a word or two and pictures. I really can't comment because I am completely ignorant about graphic novels. I have not even read Megan's Normandy Gold. I find it very hard to follow the plot when the words might be anywhere and any size on a page. I should work on that too.
I read Ivanhoe in junior high (mid 1970s) as part of my advanced English class. So it was all the “smart kids”. I loved it. Everyone else thought it a drag. I later found out that Ivanhoe was one of my father’s favorite books and he still remembered the parts with Rowena. I think my Dad was an incurable romantic though you’d never know it from his businessman-like demeanor and worldview.
Post a Comment