I just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. One of my friends in book club raved about it so much we decided it would be our book of the month this month (next month is Rabbit Run, in eerie timing). I was all for it, but others took a bit longer to be convinced, because Book Thief is marketed in the US as a young-adult (YA) title.
One might wonder why, with its themes of death, life, starvation, suicide, bravery, cowardice, groupthink, orphans (ok, that’s common in YA). I suppose the voice is distancing, in the style of “telling a story” rather than living inside the protagonist’s skin, which could be considered a YA style—but so are some “adult” books. I think if I’d read this as a YA (like, at 14), it would have given me nightmares rather than the rich dreaming it has given me this week.
I found while doing some research on Amazon’s UK site (the writer is Australian; it was published there first), it was marketed as an adult title in the UK. I was surprised, since the YA authors I know talk about editors telling them to take out the grisly stuff (a child’s alleged suicide, for example), and here is a whole book of death.
Do US marketers think adults here want to read a different sort of story? Are YA titles selling more than adult titles (did they think they’d sell more copies of it marked “YA”)? Or did the US title lose sales because adults are less likely to “read down” (a children’s title) than children are to want to “read up”?
Of course, it’s been on the NYTimes children’s best-seller list for 71 weeks and counting, which seems good (though who knows how many copies that stands for). And ours is a “classics” book club, and we adopted the book, so maybe it has reached its true, wide, audience. I hope so—after the first few off-putting pages, I fell into the rhythm of the storytelling, and found it hard to put down. And impossible to forget.
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