9-year-old
Liesel Meminger doesn’t know how to read when her mother leaves her with a
foster family in Molching, Germany in 1939. On the train that takes them to
Molching, her little brother dies, and after he is buried, she finds a book
dropped by one of the grave diggers. This is her first book theft. Her foster
father teaches her to read using this book, which happens to be ‘The Gravedigger’s
Handbook’.
Liesel’s
story continues through the war years, through bombings, a Jew hidden in the
basement, and her foster father being conscripted into the German army. Through
it all, she continues to find books to steal and read, even reading them aloud
in the bomb shelter during air raids to distract her neighbors.
This is a
very good book about the everyday lives of ordinary German citizens during the
Nazi regime. Most World War II stories
are about the Germans as aggressors; it is seldom that the average small-town
person is depicted in literature.
578 pages
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