Try­ing to make sense of the hor­rors of World War II, Death relates the sto­ry of Liesel, a young Ger­man girl whose book-steal­ing and sto­ry-telling tal­ents help sus­tain her fos­ter fam­i­ly and the Jew­ish man they are hid­ing, as well as their neigh­bors. On the sur­face a sto­ry about the human­iz­ing pow­er of books and words, it is even more pow­er­ful in its depic­tion of Liesl’s con­fronta­tion with hor­rif­ic cru­el­ty and her dis­cov­ery of kind­ness in unex­pect­ed places.