It took exactly one post to already diverge from refreshing movie posters to doing a book cover, but technically The Book Thief was adapted for film– I just choose to forget about it, because it wasn’t nearly as macabre or darkly beautiful as the novel, and nobody has the time for bad adaptations.

Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief chronicles the adolescence of a young German orphan during World War II, tracing her relationships with her foster parents, her (sometimes unlikely) friends, and ultimately, with Death, who functions as the story’s narrator.

I picked it up on a whim based on an emphatic recommendation by my dear friend Rebekka, who had recently been wrecked by Zusak’s tale. I’m torn between wanting to give a full synopsis and wanting everyone to go to their friendly neighborhood library or their unfriendly distant Amazon and get wrecked themselves; so I think I’ll just address what makes this piece important enough to want to make fan art about it. And, disclaimer: I haven’t read it in its entirety in a while, instead going back for the moments that demand another reading from time to time.

Putting it plainly, I’m a sucker for any story in which characters have to move from ignorant youth into the tremendous pressure of knowledge, and the moral responsibility that comes with that. Liesel (our protagonist) is doing her best to stay tender-hearted and sympathetic in Nazi Germany, which is no easy feat. Her foster-parents Hans and Rosa give her the tools to emerge on the other side of the war with her sense of hope intact: that is, creative energy (from Hans), endurance (from Rosa) and love (from them both). She learns to read with the help of Max, a Jewish man harbored by her foster-parents, and along the way, acquires the powerful ability to see that words give people the means to reach and understand one another, to find common ground with others, and ownership of herself even as civilization collapses around her.

The character of Death framing the story is as powerful as it is poetic. Death is impartial, so, as a narrator, he’s perfect. He’s there for the final moments of Liesel’s friends and family, and each loss has a profound effect on her young life. Death is also a romantic (what else?), so his asides are invariably poignant and Wagnerian in scale. It’s his viewpoint that can move the book’s perspective on war from painful personal experiences to an age-old meditation on the senselessness and waste of hatred and violence. He sees his moments of soul-harvesting in vivid color, as if those dying and the manner in which they die can affect the way the world looks to him. Reading this book actually got me into the habit of identifying my feelings in terms of color, which is how I ended up with a bunch of Spotify playlists defined by the color I feel when I listen to them.

A quote from Death (about meeting him) before I get back to doing serious work: “His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do - the best ones. The ones who rise up and say "I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come." Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places.”

In thinking about how this cover ought to look, I wanted something that would convey the relationship between Liesel and Death: how, even when she’s far away from him, she’s still surrounded by him on all sides, small and awkward and human as she is. I also knew that the colors had to be lurid, the way Death illustrates the last moments of human lives in startling, searing color. Red and yellow are among the colors Death describes during air raids; and Liesel’s friend Rudy is consistently identified by his hair, the color of lemons. I modeled the title’s typeface off a bit of blackletter text from a Nazi propaganda poster, and gave everything a little bit of a charred look where possible.