Death narrates. It mostly works.

Death narrating a book for teenagers ought to be unbearable, and somehow it isn't. Two or three girls a year took this out and then took it out again in the summer, and I stopped asking why. It has that quality. Zusak found a way to write about Nazi Germany for fourteen-year-olds that doesn't lie to them, and I would sooner have this than one more well-meaning worksheet about tolerance.

The colours business is overdone and the little bold interjections would be twee in almost anyone else's hands. Somehow they aren't. Liesel stealing from the mayor's wife's library is the scene I'd read out, if I were still reading things out.

Where I'd argue with it is the sentiment. He goes back to that well too often; by the third or fourth chapter closing on a soft chord you can hear the mechanism working. Rudy is a lovely creation who exists chiefly in order to be lost, and the book knows it slightly too well.

Also, the catalogue here says 1998, which is out by seven years, and somebody ought to fix that.

Good for a thirteen-year-old who thinks they don't like reading and has just discovered that they are allowed to be sad on purpose.