Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a buyer for a bookstore, I read a lot of YA books. I read the "must-read" reviews for this book and it sounded right up my alley, deep, meaningful, thought-provoking. I didn't like it. At all. So much so that I stopped reading halfway through, something I never do. It simply isn't an engaging read, and I find it very difficult to believe many teens would get past page 3. I suppose I just don't "get" it, and other people might, so I don't want to call it an awful read. But I found the author's writing style ridiculous and totally un-readable. He seemed to think it sounded poetic, but in the end it often didn't make sense. He says things like: "She nightmared." "His face traveled." "Her voice planed and curled in her mouth." As i say, it sounds poetic, but it's just not good writing. How does using nightmare as a verb make this sentence richer than "she had a nightmare"? I don't even know how a face can travel. If he means "his expression seemed to wander to thoughts of the past," why doesn't he just say it that way? Just a few nit-picky examples, but I found the whole book to be written like that. As someone who truly does appreciate fine writing when I see it, it makes me mad that people praise The Book Thief so much. Overall, simply not that interesting. It didn't scream out to me "this story needs to be told," like so many other (especially holocaust-era) books do.