The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

 

Apparently this novel gets assigned to middle-school students; the only really obvious reason for that is that the main character is about middle-school-age. There's no other good reason I see to assign it to them, or really to anyone else--though of course there's nothing wrong with anyone reading it if they want. I got kinda tired pretty quickly of the affected, mannered narration--the premise that it's being narrated by Death (or maybe the Angel of Death) didn't strike me as being worth the mandatory level of remove, nor did the flickers of nonlinearity do anything for me but deaden the emotional impacts I have to expect it was supposed to be magnifying. It's kinda a shame, really, because many of the elements of the story itself seem as though they could have been at least a pretty good novel (if admittedly a pretty standard Holocaust story). Of course, J. Random Tween likely doesn't know the tropes at play, here, and might take a hard shot in the feels.