In 2002, 24-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which became a bestseller and won the Guardian First Book Award in addition to being The New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

Now three years later, Foer has finished his second bestseller, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

With his typical melange of comedy and tragedy, Foer tells the story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an ambitious and heartbroken young boy who falls somewhere between Holden Caulfield and Dennis the Menace.

A jack-of-all-trades, quirky Oskar is a Francophile, a Shakespearean actor, a tambourine player and a jeweler who is attempting to come to terms with his father's death, caused by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Notorious for his own inventions and puzzles, Oskar's father leaves behind a key in an envelope marked with the word "black" in red ink.

In an effort to discover what the key may unlock, Oskar's quest leads him on a daunting search through Manhattan for every person whose last name is Black who may know something regarding his father and the key.

As Oskar goes about his daily quests, he distances himself from his mother as she attempts to move on from her husband's death and instead, attaches himself to his lonely grandmother who is also coping with the loss of her son.

Much like Foer's first novel, the pain of the present is intertwined with the past, which is inevitably repeated from generation to generation. As the story of Oskar's journey progresses, so does the story of Oskar's grandmother and grandfather and how they have each dealt with loss in wake of the Dresden bombings during World War II.

Thus, Foer parallels the past with the present and reveals the wars that humans beings wage against each other emotionally and physically both individually and as a collective.

-- Reviewed by Paige Reddinger