Why is it so good you can't put it down?

I just finished one of those rare books “so good you can’t put it down”:

The Book Thief.

It is about a little girl in Nazi Germany. A frail little girl – a German little girl mind you -- against the inhuman machine that is the Nazi world. The Nazi world is spreading all over Europe. The little girl’s world is in her adopted family’s basement.

But the little girl’s world is a much bigger world.

Like the few books that attain to this stature, The Book Thief is so good you can’t put it down because it transports you from your world into its world.

And you marvel at the creative gift of the author. How does he do it? How does he create such a world, woven through and through with real human beings, through and through with hope, through and through with the accidents of daily life that, months later, years later, against all odds, blossom into lifelines to the future?

If reality is simply survival of the fittest, survival by brute strength in which the weak are eliminated, why do we admire these pictures of super-human resistance -- in the heart of a little girl no less -- against the incredible strength of the Nazi machine?

The Nazi’s were all about making a world of their own by survival of the fittest. Why do we not want that kind of a world?

Why do we so promote this evolutionary dogma when, upon seeing it in action, we simply root for the alternative?

Why do we chose, rather, to root for a world filled with the dignity of the human heart?

A world tapestried through and through with the image of God ... in the worst of circumstances.

A world so filled with hope that we can't put it down.

Why?

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Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).