I give this book a lot of points for ingenuity even though I don't think it totally worked. This book is stylistically unique for good and for ill. 
 To start with the good: Having death narrate the story and periodically interject information was a device that bothered me initially but really paid off as the novel progressed. Death's narrative voice was compellingly rendered and really grabbed me. This was a great way to frame the story of Liesel. There is also some great imagery here and some of the supporting characters are well drawn and interesting (Liesel herself remains a bit of a cipher however). 
 Now the bad: Zusak has a very unusual way of crafting prose. When it works, it works very well. However, I found often times his writing style came off as maladroit. By this I mean word choice and sentence structure in this book often read like something that has been badly translated from one language into another (As I started reading I googled the author, sure that either English was not his first language or that this had been inexpertly translated from another language into English. Neither of these things are the case). 
 Some examples of what I mean by weird word choices: descriptive phrases used in this book include "dark chocolate skies" and "breakfast colored suns," people cry "yellow tears" and have "lemon colored" or "elastic" hair and "cardboard" faces. People "olden" or suffer from "oldening" and "abusages" rather than abuse. Even when descriptive language is not problematic, it is employed over and over again with no variation. For example, the mayor's wife is characterized as having fluffy hair. Almost every time we see her some comment is made about her fluffy hair. At some point we should either stop hearing about her hair or, if it merits so much attention, let's vary the word choice a bit and employ a word besides fluffy. 
 For a book that is all about the power of words, an irritating prose style is particularly problematic. I was often pulled out of the narrative by the author's weird and kind of ugly writing style. It was a persistent problem from beginning to end. 
 This book is still worth reading, but you might do some eye rolling at the stylistic choices made here as I did. As I previously mentioned, Liesel herself is also kind of a bland protagonist.