Sigh, Just thinking about this book makes me want to cry! Let’s start with the cover as you know by now that the cover is a very important start to a book. This is my book cover…

And, I dunno… I don’t really think I like it. For starters it’s made from quite an absorbent material so reading it in the bath wasn’t too practical. And, well… the picture is good I suppose. I dunno. Sommit about it isn’t quite right! I did google the book cover though and there are alternatives…
Bleagh, rubbish. Next one is pretty good though, covers two small parts of the story…

The last one, hmm, not a great image… the blood just looks rubbish…
I guess cultural issues must have made the publishers come out with different covers? Anyway, the story is narrated by Death with a capital D and is set in WWII. You end up having real empathy for Death as when he retrieves a soul from a dead body he tries to not look at them, not get caught up in the persons story. He just stares up at the moving sky above and thinks of the colours. This often doesn’t work though and he ends up following a persons sad story and keeping it with him for all eternity. By the end of the book you really think he needs a holiday (like the Death character from the Terry Pratchett books).

The other main character is Liesel, a young girl living through the horrors of the war in Germany. Her family end up hiding a Jew in their basement and she forms a fantastic friendship with him… I won’t say much more apart from Death pretty much warns you as the story progresses that things are going to go bad… and they do. For the last couple of pages in the book I just sat in the bath filling it by emptying myself out of my eyes, it was so heartbreaking. Let me go and find the book as I marked a couple of lovely sections….

The first is when the German people congregate for a book burning…

“When Liesel tried to make her way through, a crackling sound prompted her to think that the fire had already begin.

It hadn’t.

The noise was kinetic humans, flowing, charging up.

They’ve started without me!

Although something inside her told her that this was a crime – after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned – she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

The second section comes about when Max the Jew (who has been hidden in a basement and not seen the sky for nearly two years) sneaks out in an air-raid when everyone else is in a bunker…

“‘I…’ He struggled to answer. ‘When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the living room was open just a crack… I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds’

He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months.

There was no anger or reproach. It was Papa who spoke. ‘How did it look?’. Max lifted his head, with great sorrow, and great astonishment. ‘There were stars,’ he said. ‘They burned my eyes.’

Wow. The rest of the book is pretty much like that. At first it annoyed me when Death gave so much of the story away, but really he didn’t. We all know that places like Dachau were the destination of Jews in WWII, the story comes from how they got there.