I confess that I haven’t been very faithful about posting monthly book reviews lately, but I’m determined to change that.
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
I’ve been avoiding books set during World War II lately. Over the past year or so I’d read so many of that popular genre that I was growing weary of them, but The Book Thief was different from most.
Nine-year-old Liesel Meminger is illiterate when she comes to live with foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the fictional town of Molching, Germany in 1939, but she brings with her a copy of The Grave Digger’s Handbook, found partially hidden in the snow beside her brother’s grave. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and a love affair with books begins. She steals books from a Nazi book-burning, from the mayor’s wife’s library, and from anywhere else that books are found, but she isn’t a thief without a moral compass. She only steals a book when she has read the ones she already has, usually several times over. She reads with her neighbour, with a young Jewish man hidden in the Hubermann’s basement, with the mayor’s wife when she goes to pick up laundry, and in the neighbourhood shelter when bombs are falling.
In the author’s native Australia, The Book Thief is generally classified Adult Fiction, but it has often been marketed as a Young Adult novel in North America. It has, however, been challenged several times when included in school curriculums because of violence, course language, and disturbing scenes. While I wouldn’t consider it inappropriate for teenage readers, it certainly isn’t juvenile in writing style or theme. In fact, the style is so out of the ordinary that I actually found it difficult to get into at first, but I’m glad I persevered. Character development is one of the books greatest strengths and perhaps the most unusual thing about it is the use of Death as the narrator.
And now it’s your turn. If you’ve read The Book Thief, what did you think of it? Have you read any good books lately? What are you reading now?
Once in awhile you read a book that you just can’t put down. For me, The Berry Pickers was one of those. I read it while I was eating breakfast and while I was cooking supper, I read it when I should have been going to bed at night, and I read it whenever I got a chance in between.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent almost 30 years on death row in Alabama. In 1985, he was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder, but his only crime was being poor and black.
Being diagnosed with a life-changing illness can be completely overwhelming. In Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest, Drs. Sammy Winemaker and Hsien Seow offer a valuable guide to help patients and families deal with their new reality. Combining their decades of palliative care research and experience caring for seriously ill patients and harnessing the advice of thousands of patients, they offer 7 keys for navigating a life-changing diagnosis. With real-life stories, tips, and exercises, these compassionate experts empower patients with practical tools to help them successfully navigate the health care system with knowledge and confidence.
At the outset, Gina Holmes’ Crossing Oceans reminded me of a sappy Christmas movie. You know the ones… after several years away, beautiful young woman returns to her quaint mid American hometown where she encounters sweet, kindhearted, and inexplicably single man from her past who sweeps her off her feet and solves all her problems.
Like many children in wartime Britain, 10-year-old Agnes Crawford was sent out of London to the safety of the countryside where she lived with the well-to-do McIntyre family. Tragically orphaned by the war, she stayed on afterward as their maid and close friend of their daughter, Isobel. When tragedy strikes again, Agnes adopts her deceased friend’s identity and with it the opportunity to become a medical student at a London university. 
Not Our Kind is the story of two very different women whose lives intersect on a rainy morning in June, two years after the end of World War II. A minor traffic accident in New York City brings together Eleanor Moskowitz, a bright young teacher on her way to a job interview, and Patricia Bellamy, a socialite whose difficult thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, recovering from polio, needs a private tutor. When Eleanor goes to work for the Bellamys, she forms an immediate bond with Margaux, but because they live in a restricted building, she has to conceal her Jewish identity.
Until the end, when the two finally come together, this is really two completely different storylines connected only by a specific location.
In 2003, Morris, was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly gentleman who “might just have a story worth telling”. As their friendship grew, Lale entrusted her with the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust. She originally wrote his story as a screenplay before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, we are introduced to Cilka, a beautiful young prisoner who is forcibly separated from the other women by Johann Schwarzhuber, camp commandant, for his exclusive use. Quickly learning that her survival depends on it, she does what she has to do to stay alive. Although both books are historical novels, Cilka, like Lale, was a real person and at one point, he credits her with saving his life.
The subtitle of this short, but intriguing memoir, My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan, tells much about the content of the book, but it could also be misleading to those of us living in western cultures. This is not a book about living a trans experience.
Following Augustine 