Question 2.

[Carol]

2. What did you think of the plot line development? How credible did the author make the plot? Did the plot take turns you did not expect, or did you find it predictable?

[Carol]

Emily, good points....and I agree 100% with you. I thought the plots were effectively foreshadowed. And Zusak did a tremendous job and fascinating way to give us the readers the line on what would be happening. I loved this concept.

[Ashley]

I thought the narrator overdid the foreshadow a bit. Most of the time it underscored the character of Death as this omnipresent narrator, but several times I found the glimpses of the future rather jumpy, irritating, and a even a little gimmicky.

As far as overall plot development, I think the novel moved a bit more slowly than it needed to, and it was pretty predictable that Liesel and Max would reunite at the end (though I might have gotten misty-eyed anyway). Still, Zusack portrayed how complex war, racism, poverty, and propaganda converge and slowly come to a bizarre simmer. I also like that we saw a side of Germans we don’t typically see in WWII-era novels. I mean, a whole lot of citizens were stuck between a rock and a hard place. How far out on a limb can you go, if you have five kids at home. And, by centering the story on children, the author really used the book-stealing and Jew-feeding and so on to show the fundamental innocence of kids.

The novel really made me think of my mother-in-law (she’s native German), and her house was bombed when she was about 4 or 5 years old. Obviously, she and her siblings were entirely innocent in the horrors of Germany during that time. Her family had a large factory that made farm equipment, but the Nazis insisted that they instead make weapons for the German military. What could her father do? He had five children! Yes, the German civilians were incredibly complicit in the holocaust. But. The Nazis were incredibly powerful. Eventually, her father was captured by the French and was a prisoner of war in a camp for several years. Due to his treatment there, he died not too long after being freed. I don’t have a clue what his political beliefs were, but I seriously doubt that he just jumped on the Nazi bandwagon. Anyway, my point is that the book shows that nothing in war—even a country as easy to hate as Germany during WWII—is black and white. Zusak uses plot—most mostly characters—to show this.