It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still. 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 behind 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 accordian-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.

To be very honest here I had a lot of expectations for this book, because I’ve heard a lot of good about it. After reading this book, or I should say trying to read this book I just don’t understand the hype with this book because in my opinion this book isn’t as good as people claim it to be.

The plot is about Nazi Germany and I tend to love books set in that time period but this book is bad. Because the more you read the more boring and uninteresting this book becomes.

The narrator of this book is Death itself. Which might work for some books but it didn’t work fir this book. Having a narrator doesn’t work for this book because the entire book we follow the same character and we see everything from the main characters perspective. So you don’t think about the narrator telling the story unless the narrator makes a comment outside the main story which makes you remember that there is a narrator in this book which isn’t the main character. 

At the same time the narrator use very nonsensical language. Which really bugged me a lot because it would just paused me for a short time every once and a while.

The beginning of this book was actually interesting but the further you get into this book the more and more boring and uninteresting it becomes.

Its important to say that I DNF-ed this book after having read like 52% of this book. Because reading this book was a torture to me since it irritated me and bored me so much that I just couldn’t handle to finish this book. But at the same time I’m not a fan of historical fiction books especially if they are about nazi Germany and the holocaust because its a very dark time in human history.

This book was very anti-climatic because the narrator would tell us what would happen next before it actually happened. And I really hate it whenever this happen because I don’t like someone telling me what will happen next in a book / show / movie before I see it for myself.

During my time reading this book I started to think that the author was more interesting about marketing this book rather than actually giving us a good book.

The writing style of this book because it was 100% telling-without-showing anything to us. Which I find every single time to be very boring and so off-putting. But the same time the writing style in this book is very weak, and it was like the author didnt even care about giving us a good book but rather cared about the paycheck he would get after finishing and publishing this book.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like this book so much because it had a very good premise but after trying to read it, I dislike it so much. 

One of the many reasons why I dislike this book as much as I do is that it is very repetitive. The book uses the same phrases, events etc all the time in this book and it like the author doesn’t know when enough is enough with being repetitive.

The characters in this book are so all over the place. The main character is a young girl, and really I don’t know what to think about here. Since at times she makes hard decisions like an adult but other times she just makes the stupidest decisions ever. The adoptive mother of the main character is a mean asshole for no reason to the little girl. And the adoptive father of the main character is a people pleaser, he just cant say no to his adoptive daughter nor to his wife so he ends up being the d-bag when the mother says something else.

I Give This Book 1 / 5