Let’s make it Book Review Day! Here’s one I wrote for The Book Thief awhile ago.
You do one too! Or if you’ve already written one, link it up here.
First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here. Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.
Here’s a review I wrote years ago, and submitted to NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5196670
It’s about “My Name is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok. Potok is one of my all-time favorite authors.
P.S. I read “The Book Thief” a couple years ago because of your review.
Hey, Deb. Crawling slowly back to PrompTuesday!!
I haven’t written a review, but I just read Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” – which is a futuristic epistolary novel about an America where a consumerist culture obsessed with personal appearance and sexual appeal dominates a population of uneducated apolitical people who have given up their civil rights. The dysfunctional government has created an economy where corporate interests rule and the Chinese government eventually forecloses on America for its debt, causing a breakdown of society. In this setting, a love story between an aging Russian Jewish man and a 20 year old Korean girl, doomed to failure.
Whew! It’s a satirical novel written in 2010, but it’s eerily prescient. Funny, heartbreaking, and scary.
I just read The Book Thief a month ago (I know. Slow to get to the good stuff, apparently. I had to finish the Twilight series first, of course. Sniff.)
But The Book Thief knocked my socks off (that is such an antiquated cliche, but really. I freakin’ loved it!).
I loved Death as a narrator; I LOVED the characters you unexpectedly cheer for (the mother? Come on! She could have been a classic evil step-mom but she was amazing – and don’t get me started on Papa. I adore him).
What surprised me most about the book was Mark Zusak’s timeline/chronology. He let us know exactly what was going to happen from the beginning…I thought, huh. How can he pull this off? He already showed his hand…
But oh, did he ever pull it off. I admired (and was jealous of) the way he handled each thread of the story. No Hollywood endings. Just love. And hope. And loss. And then new beginnings.
Loved it. So much.
(Can you tell?)
p.s. I was just kidding about the Twilight series, by the way. I did read it, but only because as a high school English teacher I pretty much had to. Every girl in my class (and many boys too) were reading them. So.