The Book Thief

I'm here with the next installment of the UNspoiled! Book Club, and this time it's Jaime Smith joining me to talk about The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. This is a book from a unique perspective, to say the least, and it's understandable why it's grown as acclaimed as it has. However, I have to be honest. I didn't love this book. Don't get me wrong, it's a really captivating idea and overall I found the plot to be interesting, as well as the peeks at how ordinary Germans who weren't in danger of camps lived during the Second World War. All of that was compelling and frankly lined up with America in 2018 in ways that I found to be unnerving. But the prose was simply not my cup of tea, and I found it really distracting. The term Jaime used was "purple prose" and I think that comes the closest to describing it. There are times when using words in unusual and unexpected ways can work for an author, and bring special attention to a certain moment, but in this book the wild phrasing and pulpy descriptions happened every other sentence. I would spend more time thinking about the previous sentence and whether that really worked than I would spend paying attention to the story. But like I said, I didn't hate this book. It simply didn't wow me the way I had expected from the way in which people talked about it. I would be very interested to hear what you thought of it! If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here: https://amzn.to/2qFzbVX And if you're ready to move onto the May book, A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, you can find that book here! https://amzn.to/2qFDC2h