For example, you can download special celebrity posters of a wide variety of people who support the cause. This year, the focus is on the NBA and WNBA stars. Or you can send in a postcard to the National Geographic for Kids and win prizes. There are also lesson plans for teachers and kid-friendly printable activities with “everyone” from Dora the Explorer to the Sprouse Brothers, from author John Lithgow to Nancy Drew.
And while you’re busy reading this month and getting caught reading, you might want to check out this book, about a very original reader caught in the act.
THE BOOK THIEF, by Markus Zusak (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). A book narrated by Death, set in Nazi Germany, promises heartbreak and sorrow. While THE BOOK THIEF delivers these in great measure, it also crackles with life, love and beauty.
Liesel is a young girl who, within the first few pages, faces the untimely death of her brother and her mother’s abandonment of her to foster parents. Her last moments with her brother are colored by her first act of thieving — she picks up a book dropped by one of the gravediggers. Unable to read it, she keeps it as a remembrance of her brother.
We never learn exactly how Liesel came to be placed with her new foster parents, Rosa and Hans Huberman, but through this epic journey that seesaws between back-story from World War I and current narrative in Hitler’s Germany, we discover how love can be forged through connection and caring, and how words can have meanings far beyond their dictionary definitions.
Rosa Huberman uses an abusive tongue to keep her tough through life’s daily trials. Liesel is called a Saumench, and her “papa” Hans is called a Saukerl — the feminine and masculine for “filthy pig!” Liesel adopts the verbal stylings of Rosa, while learning through the patient efforts of Hans how to read.
She also forges a friendship with Rudy Steiner, a boy with corn-colored hair and an “unnatural” appreciation for the African American athlete, Jesse Owens.
Through her adjustments to her new home, and the increasing militarism and anti-semitic atmosphere of her native country, Liesel grows in body and soul. When Hans decides to keep a promise to the widow of a man who saved his life in World War I, a new kind of danger and life of secrecy wraps its arms around her.
The story is told with a variety of interesting techniques: mismatching words, the use of colors as seen by the narrator Death, short notes and explanations in bold, and chapter headings that point the direction of what’s ahead. We get sentences like “The horizon was the color of milk.” We get phrases like “ruffled shoulders” and “the clumsiness of sorrow.” The writing is simply stunning-evocative of time, place, mood, and yet always moving the story forward, never excessive or redundant.
Slipped between the pages is Ilsa Hermann, the mayor’s wife, who watches as Liesel steals a book from a burning pile of “Jewish” trash. And it in this simple discovery, another link is forged, another story about the power of books and words woven into the fabric of a girl’s life.
Liesel steals books because she loves books, she loves the power of words, and she also hates books and hates the power of words, and from both antithetical feelings she is compelled to look for books, to steal books even while she needs food and money.
This is a moving story of great power and depth. Although it is focused on a girl from the age of 11 to 14, and is therefore a good choice for young adults who have the maturity to deal with its darker themes, it is rich in all of human drama, and very appropriate for adults as well. (Ages 14+).
