This book ripped my heart out and stomped all over it, then tore it to shreds. I was ugly crying while reading the last quarter on a plane. But it was so, so, so good. Everything, from the writing style to the characters/their development, to the little notes from Death himself throughout the book was so well done.

The premise of this book was interesting to me right from the start. Usually, World War 2 stories focus on the oppressed, not the oppressor. So right away, I was a bit wary when the main character was a German girl. But this book did something really beautiful in using WW II as a backdrop instead of a main focal point. Sure, the atrocities of Germany during that time were important to the story and the characters/their development, but this was not just a WW II story. It was a story about a girl faced with so much hardship and the people in her life who cared enough to want to make it better for her. It was a story about kindness and how hard it can be to uphold morals and human decency under a tyrannical regime. It was a story about the power of words and knowledge, and what happens when these are withheld from the masses. And it was a beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful story.

I always appreciate well-written characters, and this book had nothing but well-written characters. Each person was multi-faceted, and they each had their own development arca that were well planned and well executed. I really liked the authors use of irony to foretell the fates of the characters. At first, I thought that the combination of tragic and dramatic irony used to in Death's narration would ruin the end of the book, but I still felt the tragedy of the final fate of each character to my core (and sobbed over it). When it came down to it, the writing of the final scenes of the book was just so powerful and moving. Honestly, I think it was the deeply developed characters that made this a 5 ⭐ read for me.