The Book Thief

I've decided to rework my unwieldy antebellum-America novel in terms of genre and target audience.

I hope to make it a "Young Adult" novel. That seems to be the publishing industry's term for works aimed at the 12-18 age group.

The manuscript is wildly unfocused as it stands, and follows the wanderings of a handful of fictional characters who bump into historical persons at intervals.

I've decided that in the re-write, the central consciousness of the book will be a historical figure. Daniel Webster, no less. The ms as it stands has some passages about Webster I especially like, and this will make it easy both to save and to expand on them.

Since I've made this decision, I've also started to look into examples of YA. And one that intrigues me, published two years ago, is called The Book Thief.

I urge you all to read that review. Most of it is a simple plot summary, with a minimum of critique (or of praise for that matter) and the ambition of the book's author is breath-taking.

Bravo, Markus Zusak.