The Book Thief is unsettling and unsentimental, yet ultimately poetic. Its grimness and tragedy run through the reader' s mind like a black-and-white movie, bereft of the colors of life. Zusak may not have lived under Nazi domination, but The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel' s Night. It seems poised to become a classic. - USA Today
Zusak doesn' t sugarcoat anything, but he makes his ostensibly gloomy subject bearable the same way Kurt Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five : with grim, darkly consoling humor.
- Time Magazine
Elegant, philosophical and moving...Beautiful and important.
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred
An extraordinary narrative.
- School Library Journal, Starred
Exquisitely written and memorably populated, Zusak's poignant tribute to words, survival, and their curiously inevitable entwinement is a tour
de force to be not just read but inhabited.
- The Horn Book Magazine, Starred
One of the most highly anticipated young-adult books in years.
- The Wall Street Journal
From the Hardcover edition.