My main problem with this book is the narrator. 
 As explained on the cover, this book is narrated by Death, which I think is 50% responsible for the 4.37 rating on Goodreads (the other 50% is given by the well-known "It made me cry so much!!!"). 
 I suppose the author was desperately aiming for originality when he made this choice,for which, I must admit, he was abundantly repaid. 
 Still, I don't buy it. 
 First of all, Death's narration doesn't add anything to the story. Yes, Death is omniscient, just like any other omniscient narrator in thousands of other books. Sometimes we see Death in action, taking the souls from someone and cradling it on his way... we don't know where since the author never tells us, limiting himself to describe Death as It steals the soul from a dead body. But did we really need Zusak's wondrous imagination to concoct this trite, abused cliche, which probably crosses everybody's mind around the age of six? Oh well, this Death also throws in some comment about how sad it is for the poor soul to be dead, how humans can be really stupid, how much work humans gave him during the war and that the sky that day was some absurd color, like chocolate, since Death has muffled all its emotions but has kept a knack for colors. How poetic. 
 This, by the way, is also the only personality trait shown by the narrator, who remains mainly totally devoid of personality and incredibly boring, considering whom we are talking about. Nonetheless, Death being Death, It feels compelled to talk in a convoluted, highly rhetorical and overly-dramatic way, with an abundance of incarnations and metonimies and a boundless passion for verbs in the passive form. Moreover, to add some more drama, the narrator overplays its omniscience by scattering foreshadowing sentences every other page: expressions like "If only the had known..", "This would be the last time that.." or "She couldn't know that..." can be found almost in every chapter, often revealing events well into the future, so that you read the book already knowing which character is doomed and which is not. 
 I personally believe that the Holocaust is already a very dramatic event in itself, there is no need to overdo in such a rough way, otherwise you'll give the impression that you were just looking for some kind of tear-jerker and "orphan girls hiding Jews" looked like a promising candidate. Impression confirmed by the choice of the title which will make readers think of a girl who tries to save as much books as possible from Nazi's book burning while Liesel, the protagonist, just steals a handful of books almost by chance and, in the beginning, even without purpose since the girl can't read. But her beloved foster papa will teach her and thanks to the poor Jew in the basement and a bunch of (supposedly) symbolic drawing she will learn the "power of words" and that Hitler apparently reached power through them. I'm not saying this is bad, just very predictable and devoid of an original contribution to Holocaust literature. 
 I will not lose time commenting the stereotyped characters and situations, I just want to say that I could accept such a heavy-handed symbolism only in a book for children under the age of ten (by the way I've read that this book war written for adults but in the US it was re-classified for YA.., if this is true, it doesn't surprise me). 
 The two stars are only because I was mildly interested in Liesel and Max's fate and so I kept reading till the end (which, by the way, as a proof of Zusak's poorness as an author is just another botched tear-jerker) but I have to say that this is one of the worst books about Holocaust I've ever read. 
 I would suggest the author and his readers to go and learn who Primo Levi was.