Every time there war a possibility that the next person would have the clue.

The thing that kept me reading this book was of course the search for the lock. However the attack at the World Trade Center could be replaced by an other disaster and WW II you can’t replace for an other disaster or horrible thing happened in the past. Secondly the World Trade Center stood in New York. The place New York and the year 2001 are of course logical, firstly when the story would take place in for example 2005 I think Oscar would already have accepted the fact that his father is dead and he wouldn’t search through his stuff any more. He also lost his girlfriend called Anna which was the sister of Oscar’s grandmother. The past in Dresden is incredibly important in this story because the relation between Oscar’s grandparents is really complicated, and Thomas, Oscar’s grandfather, lost his ability to speak after Dresden was bombed. The other place is in Dresden before and after the 2nd world war, in this place there is only written about Oscars grandparents. One is New York after the attack at the World Trade Center in this part is mostly written about Oscar and sometimes about his grandparents. The story takes place in two different places and times.

Oscars aim is to find the lock which belongs to the key, because there are 162 million locks in New York, he is going to visit and ask everyone with the surname black in alphabetical order. When he shows the envelope to a woman in the hobby shop, She tells him that it is a common surname. He starts to ask some people whether they know something about the key or the word Black. The key doesn’t look familiar to Oscar, it’s larger and longer than a normal key. When Oscar cleans up the broken vase he finds an envelope with on the front the word Black and inside a strange key. One day a blue vase fell of the cupboard into shards when he was searching. He loves to listen to his dad’s voice and search through his belongings. Oscar has hidden the tape with these records, so his mother doesn’t get angry because he didn’t answer the phone. Before Thomas died he called several times to his house, no one took the phone so he left some messages behind on the answering machine. His grandfather left her when she was pregnant of his dad.

Now he lives with his mom and her new friend Ron, he doesn’t like him at all. Oscar lost his dad, Thomas, with the horrible attack at the World Trade Center. The wonderful book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close immediately starts with the thoughts of Oscar Shell, a 9 year old boy.

Incredibly close book