Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is narrated by Death, and he isn’t the scythe-swinging figure you’d expect. He’s overworked and a little bitter about it, which makes sense because the story takes place in Nazi Germany during World War II. He’s also surprisingly gentle with the girl whose story he decides to tell.

That girl is Liesel Meminger. In 1939 she’s nine years old, riding a train with her mother and little brother to a foster home outside Munich. Her brother dies on the way. At his burial in the snow, a gravedigger’s apprentice drops a book called The Grave Digger’s Handbook, and Liesel picks it up. She can’t read yet. It’s her first theft, and everything else in the story grows out of it.

Her foster parents are Hans and Rosa Hubermann, who live on Himmel Street in the small town of Molching. Hans is a house painter with an accordion and endless patience. When Liesel wakes up screaming from nightmares, he sits up with her and teaches her to read from the gravedigger’s manual, painting new words on the basement wall. Rosa takes in washing for richer families and swears at everyone, Liesel included. It takes a while to see how much she loves the girl, and Zusak lets that come out slowly.

Then there’s Rudy Steiner, the boy next door. He worships Jesse Owens and spends most of the book asking Liesel for a kiss. And there’s Max Vandenburg, a young Jewish man who turns up at the door one night. His father saved Hans’s life in the First World War, so Hans keeps an old promise and hides Max in the basement. Max and Liesel bond over words. He paints over the pages of Mein Kampf and uses them to write and illustrate a story for her. It’s one of my favorite moments in the book.

Words are what the novel is really about. Liesel steals a book from a Nazi bonfire and others from the mayor’s wife’s library, and reading becomes how she gets through the war. But Zusak never lets you forget that Hitler rose to power through words too. The thing that keeps Liesel going is the same thing pouring out of the radios and rallies around her. Reading it now, when so much of what we read is people arguing online, made me think about how carelessly most of us use words.

The book is also honest about ordinary Germans. The Hubermanns take huge risks, but most of their neighbors cheer at the book burning, look away or just keep quiet. One day Hans hands a piece of bread to a Jewish prisoner being marched through town, and that one small act puts the whole household in danger. The fallout shows how much it costs to do the right thing when almost nobody else will.

Death’s narration is what sets this book apart from other WWII novels. Early on, he tells you who is going to die. You’d think that would ruin the suspense, but it does the opposite. You spend hundreds of pages dreading something you know is coming, and knowing doesn’t make the last chapters any easier. His final line, “I am haunted by humans,” sums up the book better than I could.