The Book ThiefHeidiStillman,
2012single work drama 'Liesel Meminger is a young girl struggling to survive in Nazi Germany. Her life is filled with risk and danger but her love of books guides her through a brutal world. Death watches over her, fascinated by humankind's will to live. The Book Thief looks at the terrible cost of violence, bearing witness to our compassion and complicity. When Death tells a story, you listen.'
Source: Steppenwolf Theatre Company website, http://www.steppenwolf.org Sighted: 24/10/2012
'It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.' Source: Libraries Australia. (Sighted 30/10/08).
Notes
Dedication: For Elizabeth and Helmut Zusak, with love and admiration.
Included on the United States Board on Books for Young People and the Children's Book Council (US) 2006 Outstanding International Booklist.
Selected in 2012 by Chicage Public Library for 'One Book, One Chicago'.
Ranked #2 in ABC1's First Tuesday Book Club '10 Aussie Books to Read Before You Die' 2012 voting ballot.
Other formats: Also braille, sound recording and large print.
Affiliation Notes
This work is affiliated with the AustLit subset Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing because it has Japanese, Chinese and Korean translations.
The Book Thief is indexed as an adult book, but the affiliation applies because it has been reviewed as a young adult text, and has also won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.
UndercoverSusanWyndham,
2012single work column — Appears in:
The Sydney Morning Herald,19-20 May2012;A column canvassing current literary news including a report on the selection of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief as the title for the 2012 'One Book, One Chicago' reading campaign.
'Into Eternity’s Certain Breadth' : Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s The Book ThiefJenniAdams,
2010single work criticism — Appears in:
Children's Literature in Education,Septembervol.
41no.
32010;'This article examines the consolatory possibilities presented by Markus Zusak's recent crossover novel The Book Thief, investigating the degree to which the novel delivers the simultaneous consolation and confrontation identified with children's and young adults' Holocaust texts by such critics as Adrienne Kertzer and Lawrence Baron. Contending that the supernatural nature of the novel's redemptive imagery ultimately undermines its apparently consolatory purpose, the article concludes with an analysis of the extent to which such a reading is complicated by the novel's status as crossover text, and the triangular gaze that might subsequently be attributed to its adult readers.' (Editor's abstract)
