- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
- Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Book Thief was loaned to me with two pieces of information: it’s about a foster girl who adjusts to her new family in WWII Germany, and it’s narrated by death.
Unfortunately, death as the narrator of Liesel’s story didn’t work for me. Not only is it difficult to understand why death should care so much about Liesel’s story and the books that she’s stolen (sometimes from Nazi book-burning parties), but the scenes are also interrupted by these odd headline-style sentences.
***AN EXAMPLE***
This is exactly what the headlines look like.
Except with slightly relevant information
about the story.
Sometimes.
They appear on nearly every page. The fragmentation of the narrative to tell me things that I could have just as easily inferred from the story kept pulling me out of what was happening, however interesting.
My frustration with this is the main reason that I stopped reading it. I just wasn’t persuaded why death would tell this particular story in this particularly odd manner. I cared about the person hiding in Liesel’s basement, but the narration style was too disruptive for me to want to finish out the next three hundred pages.
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