The Book Thief

The Book Thief

(This review first appeared in February 2007) Rating:   The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Knopf (2006), 552 pages. This is the story of a German girl living in a foster family in a working-class town in Germany during World War II. Such a setting encompasses,...
The Glimmer Palace

The Glimmer Palace

Rating:  The Glimmer Palace, by Beatrice Colin.  Riverhead Books (2008), 414 pages. This novel takes place in cabaret-era Berlin and involves the birth of cinema—two topics that, for no good reason at all, I find strangely dull and uneventful.  But since I...