In an interview with Publishers Weekly in February, Markus Zusak, 30, a first-generation Australian of German descent, said he hoped young adult readers would appreciate his new book for its toehold into new territory. “Whether it worked or not, you just want people to see the attempt,” he said.
BOOK REVIEW
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Knopf, 552 pages, ages 12 and older, $16.95
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Zusak's expectations are far too modest.
In “The Book Thief,” he has triumphed, creating an old world with new players, most prominently Death. He has drawn us into 1939 Germany, where humanity is not in short supply, and made us feel – ache – for the Germans and the Jews, and even for Death, who may be the most tearful of all.
Death is narrating: “The survivors. They're the ones I can't stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprise. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs.”
It takes 100 pages or so to trust Death, as a narrator, to be innocent, not malevolent; a conveyor instead of an instigator. In time, as that happens, the reader is magnetically pulled into this story of a young girl's gutsy survival in a world gone to hell.
We meet the protagonist, the young Lisle, traveling with her younger brother and mother to meet a new foster family outside Munich. Mid-journey, Death takes her brother and Lisle finds in the snowy graveyard her first book, “Gravedigger's Handbook.” In her grief, she pockets it.
She will steal other books – from a bereaved benefactor, from the bonfire of a Nazi book burning. She will learn to read with her foster father, a man who plays the accordion and whose kindness melts Lisle's fear and pain. Later she will read, as a salve, to her neighbors during bombing raids, and most poignantly to Max, the Jewish fistfighter the family hides in their basement.
The world dives around Lisle. Her foster father is conscripted. Her best friend is tormented by Nazi Youth. Bombing raids shatter the town. Max is captured and marched to Dachau.
Throughout, Death watches and tells us his heartbreaking truths: “The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”
This is never an easy read, never a glide. But, in Zusak's ability to imagine and execute, he has achieved a very personal vision that grabs the reader and does not let go.
BOOK REVIEW
The Freedom of Jenny
Julie Burtinshaw
Raincoast Books, 200 pages, ages 10 and older, $7.95 paperback
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Here is a different story of slavery that tells of the torment that comes after being freed. Burtinshaw derived her story from the life of Sylvia Stark, a young freed slave who with her family moved to San Francisco and then to western Canada in the 1850s.
Burtinshaw follows her protagonist, Jenny, from birth as a slave child in Missouri to her marriage on Salt Spring Island near Vancouver. In between, Jenny's father raises enough money to buy the family's freedom, and they travel the Oregon Trail to a new future.
But for freed slaves, California turned out to be less than the promised land. In 1858, the state passed a law prohibiting the immigration of “free Negroes” and “other obnoxious persons.”
Burtinshaw's story lacks the dramatic arc of pure fiction, presumably because of its dedication to following the story of Stark's life. There are stretches in which events don't propel character development or plot, especially the chapters detailing the family's Western migration.
And yet, Jenny is a compelling character, folded into a family that suffers the death of a mother, sister and brother, and that presses Jenny into an early adulthood.
“Jenny didn't care about the child, but she kept her peace. Momma's skin grew paler as her life drained out of her, pooling in a puddle of blood on the sheets. Jenny held a damp cloth to Momma's cracked lips. 'Dear, sweet Jesus,' she prayed silently, 'let her live.' ”
The deaths transform both Jenny and her father, the dreamers of the family. As the struggles against racism and poverty propel them northward, they become echoes of their former selves, settled into new skins, tougher and scarred.
Burtinshaw has written an honest and brave account of a family's struggle and failure to capture the elusive dream of freedom.
BOOK REVIEW
Private Peaceful
Michael Morpurgo
Scholastic, 202 pages, ages 12 and older, $5.99
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At the end of “Private Peaceful,” there's a tug to start again at the beginning. Can an author hope for higher praise?
Great Britain's former Children's Laureate has written a story of two brothers in counterpoint: both at home, roaming wild in the English countryside with the beautiful Molly, and then in the rat-filled, frigid trenches of World War I.
Tommo, the younger, tells us all on the night before a dawn of horror from his lonely post in Belgium, bayonet and gas mask at his side. What will happen in the morning only becomes clear in the very last pages.
Morpurgo sets this up expertly, engaging us from the first pages in the lives of Tommo and his beloved brother, Charlie. Early, Tommo entrusts us with his secret: his involvement in his father's death, a searing memory that torments and causes him to feel more cowardly than he is.
Charlie – heroic and flawed – becomes the substitute father for a family held captive by the feudal and imperialistic Colonel, who owns the land and pretty much the people surrounding it. But boys with heart find ways to subvert such power, even if they sometimes get caught red-handed, with poached salmon and trout in their hands.
Morpurgo writes beautifully. “Both of them being older than me, Molly by two years, Charlie by three, they always ran faster than I did. I seem to have spent much of my life watching them racing ahead of me, leaping the high meadow grass, Molly's plaits whirling about her head, their laughter mingling. When they got too far ahead I sometimes felt they wanted to be without me. I would whine at them then to let them know I was feeling all miserable and abandoned, and they'd wait for me to catch up. Best of all Molly would sometimes come running back and take my hand.”
When this world crashes – Tommo is only 16 when he enlists – it is epic loss that won't be forgotten.
Leigh Fenly is Quest editor of the Union-Tribune. She has three sons, ages 17, 18 and 22.
