Jairo.Escudero 12/03/2013
Simple language, very captivating and creative, as was the case with Foer's Everything is Illuminated.
The story is told by three different characters, though they seem to have the same style of writing; in the beginning, one needs to actually read for a bit until the content determines who is the protagonist of any given chapter. In my view, this is actually a flaw, since I really doubt that a nine year old boy, and two senior citizens, a man and a woman, would write in the same style. Apart from that, the book is very entertaining, and effortlessly pulls you into the story, making you want to find out what is happening, and what will happen. The three characters are very different people; strange, weird if I'm pressed to describe them further. However, the boy is the most likable of them all (despite giving the impression of a 20-something geek, rather than a nine-year-old know-it-all), and, gladly, is the main and most important of the three.
Foer uses some creative ploys to draw the readers in, and make them part of the story, such as the boy's picture book (which he calls "Stuff That Happened to Me"), whose pictures are distributed throughout the book; the way the grandfather, who doesn't talk, writes letters to his son for which corrections are shown on the page; the way he tries to communicate via telephone by pressing the digits corresponding to the letters (a few pages worth of numbers are displayed in the book, raising the readers' curiosity to the point that they will even consider trying to decode it); and, finally, the way the same old man warns us that the notebook he is using is about run out of pages so he will have to start writing over what he already wrote, and actually does it (the few pages corresponding to this nuance have writing over writing, and cannot be read, becoming a sea of dark ink).
The story brings to light at least three different, very violent, and traumatizing events in history (I won't expound on this so as not to ruin your reading experience). But, because of this, the whole book is emotionally charged, and sometimes more sentimental than one might expect, or want. But the story is good, and Foer obviously knows how to grab the reader, and not let go. All things considered, this is a nice, interesting, funny, sad, emotional story, and I recommend it even to people who don't like to read very much. An Extremely Easy & Incredibly Fast read.