Don't read this book ....

This is a really disappointing review to write. Usually I'm super excited and I have a cell phone jam packed with little notes I took as I read. This book, The Last Original Wife, was my first original letdown. It's written by a woman who has a really long name - it sounds impressive but her writing falls flat. Her name is Dorothea Benton Frank. 

The Last Original Wife has a cover that just screams "summer!" which is part of why I bought it. I figured it would be a great book to read in-between my "Game of Thrones" series, and it would be a great end to my too short summer. As you may or may not know I started teaching again this week. This book was a horrible respite from my first week of my second year of teaching fifth grade. 

This book is about a woman named Les married to a man named Wes. Yes, that's right. Their names rhyme. Wesley and Leslie. Ick. I was able to look past this unfortunate choice of character pairings and attempted to get into the book which starts out with Les in the waiting room of a very prestigious therapist's office. We don't know quite why she's there, but we can guess. Her husband is a jerk. As the book progresses her husband is beyond a jerk, he's ... truly terrible. A horrible man. Unfortunately he's so horrible that it's almost hard to believe. He left her behind in Scotland and she fell into a manhole and broke a bunch of stuff, then he ditched her at the hospital to go play golf and sent his friend's young woman (who she hates of course) to watch over her. This is only a sliver of what this man has done to his wife. Much more crap comes on later. Unbelievable crap. 

Don't read this book unless you're really bored and there's literally nothing else on your shelves to pick up. The women feel demoralizing (as they should), the men are pompous idiots, the kids take advantage of their moms, and Les escapes her husband to go live with her gay brother and his pampered dog (who yes, wears clothes). Oh there's also a thing about ghosts in the house that make them sandwiches and fold their clothes ....... yup. The dialogue is bad, and when Wesley has his own chapters from his point of view they're completely ridiculous and unbelievable. In fact, they're annoying. It's a weak story and I'd consider calling it "old lady fiction" geared toward old ladies who don't have the ability to read good and challenging stories. The book is slow. I mean Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't exactly a literary masterpiece but it made women happy and it was definitely entertaining. This is just ... lackluster at best. I'm diving back into the George R.R. Martin books, and I'm on the third installment - A Storm of Swords. I know it'll be good because I loved the first two - and it's 1,000 + pages so it might take me a while to finish now that school has started. 

Keep reading folks, just not The Last Original Wife. The best written part of the whole thing was this little tidbit that I think we can all commiserate with, "there was nothing on earth that could surpass the value of camaraderie between women, especially women in crisis." This book put me in a crisis - I skimmed the epilogue just to get it over with faster.  

The Book Thief

I just now finished reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and I couldn't wait to write about it. I was sobbing by the end of it, silently. Silently sobbing at the injustice of our world and the power that one character can hold over a reader. The book is captivating and heartbreaking, and you know that the world in which these characters live in is one ruled by hatred, fear and words. 

The cover- dominoes getting ready to fall just like the bodies who fell during the war

This story is going to be seared into my memory for a long time. The story takes place starting in about 1939 in Nazi Germany. "The country is holding its breath." We meet a young girl named Liesel Meminger. She experiences her younger brother dying on a train. She's there when he's buried in snow. And as she leaves she picks up a dropped book and takes it - it is The Grave Digger's Handbook. This is a story about Liesel, a young German girl taken to live with foster parents who become her whole entire world. It is with these new parents of hers that she learns how to read, she learns how to survive in Nazi Germany, and it is here with these parents on Himmel Street that Liesel steals books. Her parents try to give her what they can, but she develops a love for books that transcends the burning intensity of the world around her. 

In the dangerous times of Nazi Germany, Liesel grows up, and everything changes for her and her family when they decide to hide a Jew in their basement. This story of Liesel the book thief is narrated by death. Death is personified and he is the one who finds a book that Liesel wrote toward the end of the war. A book about her life, and it is Death who shares her story with us based on what he's read and also from his perspective of things. As you can imagine, Death was very busy during WWII. 

I started reading this book because I was hoping that I would be able to read it out loud to my students. I noticed as I read that before each chapter (if I were to read this aloud) I would want to go over vocabulary. This book is filled with great vocabulary words that if learned correctly by students could be great for elevating their own understanding of words. For students to understand this story you would have to take frequent breaks to explain, elaborate and check in with them and discuss it, possibly even putting reflections on the board for them to follow - sequencing types of things. Here's the problem with this book for 5th grade students. It's rough. It would expose them to a dark time in history with a book that's raw and real and they would get attached to characters whose futures at times are  uncertain to us as readers. Also, the biggest problem in reading this book out loud to students is the language. The language is a problem for fifth graders. Liesel's mama likes to swear in German, a lot. The last thing I need is students trying to swear in German on the playground. Now, as a teacher I could definitely censor these words and change them to words less startling as I read aloud but there's something in that which seems a little "untrue" to me. That's an issue. The other problem with reading this to fifth graders is the content is truly heartbreaking at times, and it's unapologetic. It exposes what Nazi Germany might have been like for children growing up in this time - forced to go to Hitler Youth meetings, forced to say "Heil Hitler" even when they despise the man and his power of words. His power through hatred rules their upbringings. 

Based on the personal circumstances of some of my students, I have sadly concluded that at this point in time, The Book Thief is not appropriate for them. This is not to say that I won't read it aloud to them this year, because I might. But it would be after careful planning and some slight censoring of words, and most importantly after I have built a strong relationship with my class based on trust, understanding, and once I can ascertain that their maturity levels have reached a point where they are ready to discuss and engage with material such as this. So we'll see whether or not we reach a point where all this is possible for us. I really DO want them to be exposed to this book, because it is very educational and perhaps even path-changing for them. It certainly would get them thinking. I would recommend this book for 7th grade and up. Some 6th graders could probably attempt to read it on their own, but they might struggle with some of the high-level vocabulary words and frequent German spritzed in. 

Now back to the book and how I personally took it. As some of you who read this blog may know, or those of you who know me personally, I spent two weeks in Germany and Poland studying the aftermath of WWII with two of my college professors and a varied group of students. This being said, whenever I read anything connected to this time period I have flashes of memory pop up where I can picture train tracks, bombed buildings, memorials, Auschwitz, people and faces, and many stories. So this book attached itself to me immediately. I have never quite read anything that was about a non-Jewish German girl who stole books and learned to read from them, and from stealing these books was able to comfort those around her during air raids as they all sat huddled in a bomb shelter basement, and who was able to ultimately record her own story for us to experience from the perspective of Death. Crazy, right? Crazy good.  

Here's how the story felt to me. The story from Death's perspective was hard to follow at first; it was very disjointed. Little snippets of someone else's life sewn together haphazardly. Here we are hearing about Death and what his "life" is like, and in turn he's telling us the story about this girl, Liesel. Eventually the book smooths out, and we can follow along quite easily as Liesel grows up on Himmel street with her new parents. So if the book seems choppy at first, stick with it. It fast becomes more understandable and it'll grab a hold of you. 

Death talks about needing to take frequent distraction breaks from his work, and so one thing that distracts him is color. He sees colors when he goes to collect his souls; he notices them in the atmosphere. He mentions the grey color of Europe. Europe is grey. This makes sense to me as someone who has been to Europe quite a few times. When we were in Germany and Poland it was constantly drizzling and Berlin particularly seemed grey. The stones were grey, the buildings were grey, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was grey, and the sky was grey. Poland was hazy and dark. Auschwitz was grey and dark brown and blacks and rust. Death in The Book Thief notices things like this. 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe - Grey

Train Tracks - Auschwitz 

Auschwitz

Germany

Liesel comes to us around the age of 10. She is described as having blonde enough hair for the times, but having brown eyes where in Nazi Germany it's preferable to have blue. This is where a book such as this would be good for young readers. It show's them the intricacies of Nazi Germany. The rules, the customs, the norms. Once Liesel settles in with her foster family, she has nightmares. She dreams about her dead brother and wakes up freaking out. Her papa, her foster father, sits with her through these nightmares and comforts her. He never leaves.  Throughout the telling of Liesel's story, Death will sometimes offer his own interjections. Here is one of them: "A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY - Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children." Even when sleep deprived, Hans Hubermann, Liesel's new papa, would never leave her. And this is the man she grew to love more than anyone else in her life. It was Hans who would take her into the basement when she couldn't sleep and teach her how to read. She was obsessed with books but never had the power to read them until Hans gave it to her. The next book that Liesel would steal after they got through The Gravedigger's Handbook, was a book she took from the fires of a Nazi book burning. 

Liesel has to join a band of girls in the Hitler Youth and go to meetings. She has to suffer through the often hilarious swearing of her mama, Rosa Hubermann. The book is really quite funny at times which offsets the serious nature of the world they live in. Stealing books becomes an escape for her. 

We see Liesel and other Germans in her town struggle with life in Nazi Germany - struggling to support the Nazi party and also not feel guilt about seeing other humans reduced to nothing. Worse than nothing - scum, forgotten, killed, tortured, marched. The father of Liesel's best friend has to explain to his son, Rudy, that he should be happy with beautiful blond hair and big, safe blue eyes. Nothing is clear to these young German children. They struggle with trying to understand the pain of politics. Rudy's father supports the party because he wants to keep his family safe. Death, in one of his interjections, tells us that Alex Steiner (Rudy's father), "somewhere, far down, [had an] itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out." If the parents struggle with how to feel about the war and the world they live in, how can we expect the children to get it? Rudy was a fan of Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens was a black Olympian. Rudy was told not to like Jesse Owens, and more than anything he was told this to keep him safe.

Death tells us "***SOME CRUNCHED NUMBERS***  In 1933, 90 percent of Germans showed unflinching support for Adolf Hitler." It is here that we learn that Hans Hubermann, Liesel's papa, belonged to the 10 percent who didn't. Liesel wants to be a 10 year old reading genius, and Hans works on getting her there through grueling late night reading sessions in the basement. All the while, Hans is struggling against Nazi Germany as well. Inside he doesn't support Hitler, but outside he tries to because otherwise he puts his family in danger. 

Humans like to watch destruction. Perhaps that is why the Holocaust and Nazi Germany hold a sick fascination for those of us alive today. How could a time in history such as this have ever existed? How is it possible? More so how it possible that there were people who could rise above the terror and try to beat it down with kindness and understanding? How was fear so powerful as to make people do crazy things to one another? Whatever the answers are to these questions, there is a powerful thing that WWII can teach our children today, and even teach some adults. Words have power. It was with words that Hitler ruled a nation and tried to rule the world. Hitler didn't need to pick up a gun - he could use his words to make other people do that for him. Friendship and love, however, can fight back some of the fear and hatred that comes with words. We see these lessons unfold in this book. 

Sometimes the book is choppy; sometimes you struggle to keep up with what's happening. One thing that makes keeping up with the book hard is that at one point, Death gives away the ending. He doesn't go into details per se but he tells you straight out, "oh yeah here's what happens." He does it again later on, "oh, here's another thing that happens." When Death does this it takes your breath away. You will get angry with him for telling you something you're not ready to hear. He will beat a general foreboding into your heart. Prepare for tears, folks! Toward the end, Death says "Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it's to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling." Despite his grisly job, Death has feelings too. 

     

Please read this book. It's good. It's very good. Despite the hardships and tensions of growing up as a child in Nazi Germany, this book simply highlights what it's like to grow up. We see Liesel go from a frightened child who can't read, to a woman who finally starts to understand the world and all that's good and bad within it. Read it.