** spoiler alert ** 
 This was horrible. The writing was horrible. The book jumped around and around and was so hard to follow. It was like reading something written by someone who was half squirrel and half crack head. Instead of creating colorful and deep characters using words, he used punctuation. The grandfather spoke using an abundance of useless commas, the grandmother used lots of periods and Mr. Black spoke in sentences using only exclamation points. I was thankful no spoke by asking only questions. If I would have seen a page full of question marks I think I might have thrown the book across the room! I found Oskar to be the only unique and real character in the book, but after awhile he even started to annoy me. His little quirks were too over the top, like the author was trying to compensate and distract the reader from the nonexistent plot. A boy loses his father and finds a key in an envelope with the name "Black" on it. We go through pages and pages of meeting lots of people with the name "Black" only to find out the key had nothing to do with his dad in the first place. He has weird grandparents who like to write him letters about their sex life and who really didn't add anything to the plot of the story that I could tell. Then he digs up his father's empty coffin and fills it with letters, the end. (Seriously?????) 
 I found the subject matter heart breaking, and did tear up at times, but it's hard not to tear up when anyone talks about that horrible day. I hated the pictures the most. The book had pages of meaningless pictures. But one picture stood out from the rest and made me cringe. He filled over a dozen pages with pictures of someone's loved one falling to their death from one of the burning towers of 9/11. I am outraged by this! Horrible!!!!!!