Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

I laughed out loud more often when reading this than any other book I’ve read recently, and that’s strange considering this is a novel about the Holocaust.

Everything is Illuminated is told in three different styles. One is an account of events unfolding when a Jewish-American named Jonathan Safran Foer heads to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. What makes this account hilarious is that it’s told from the perspective of a Ukrainian boy named Alex, who speaks in an incredibly humorous form of broken English. This storyline is interspersed with letters from Alex to Jonathan following their search and pieces of a novel being written by Jonathan describing the city where his ancestors were raised.

This is an extremely well-written novel by a first-time writer. Every piece of the story builds on the component before it until the point when everything is well…, illuminated.