Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I liked 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close', a book that features blank pages, pages with one line of text on them, pages with pictures of keyholes, victorious tennis players and a person jumping from the WTC on 9/11, pages with ever-denser text turning into an almost solidly black page, and so on. The reason I liked the book was not because of these oddities, but it also wasn't despite them. In the end, they seem a bit contrived and unnecessary for what is at the same time a playful and moving story of a desperate 9-year-old boy trying to make sense of the death of his father on that fateful New York day in 2001. The boy's innocent, overly brainy approach to the tragic events that surround him remind the reader of that other recent book about an emotionally disconnected little boy, 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'
His story is interspersed with that of the boy's grandparents, who once lived together in Dresden, both miraculously survived the gruesome WW2 bombings, and reunite, full of remorse, mourning and survivor guilt. The two stories run parallel for most of the book, and intertwine at the end.