** spoiler alert ** 
 I have to say that when I first saw the title, I thought it was going to be a very generic love story. 
 But that was definitely not what it was about. 
 I actually read the first twenty-something pages on Google before I rushed to the bookstore to get it. 
 This is the most poignant story I've ever read. It was so touching that there were various points in the book that I cried. From the first page, I was completely hooked and completely touched. 
 There are about three central characters in this book. Leo Gursky, Alma Singer and Zvi Litvinoff. All the characters are so well defined, and their monologues are entirely different from each other. 
 Leo's character experiences loneliness and a sense of loss, after he is separated from the love of his life and then finds out that years later she's married. His family is dead and he doesn't have any friends. In the book, we're lead to believe that Bruno is one of his close friends, but later on, toward the end, we find out that Bruno died in 1940 or 1941 and Leo's memory of him is what he re-creates and re-invents as an imaginary friend. So basically, he has been alone for most of his life. 
 Alma Singer also experiences this same loss, too, even though she has her mother and her brother. Her mother lost her husband and so she seems to have withdrawn herself from the world due to her grief. Her brother isn't exactly mentally stable. And so Alma sets out to find out more about the character she was named after in the book called The History Of Love, hoping that she'll find something that will make her mother happy. 
 Zvi is a man who has been really affected by the war and even though he marries a woman that he falls in love with, Rosa, he isn't exactly happy. 
 What really made this story so beautiful was the way each character possessed love for their beloved. With Alma, she was seeking happiness for her family. And with Leo, he sacrificed his happiness for the sake of his beloved. Because of Alma, the woman he fell in love with when he was 10, he doesn't tell Isaac that he is his father. He watches their world from a distance. 
 I'm a bit sad at the way it ended. I felt that there wasn't a very clear resolution for the characters. We never got to see what happened with Alma and Misha. And Leo never really had a good resolution. He died without anyone but Alma having the knowledge that he was the original writer of The History of Love and Words For Everything. He never got to tell his son that he was his father. 
 Rosa never got to tell Zvi that Leo was still alive, especially after plagiarizing his book. I felt like there were so many things left unsaid. 
 Another problem that I found that made the story both unique and complicated was the way the story was told. The timelines weren't clearly distinctive. I had to figure out where events happened, and I had to go back and read to confirm. 
 The ending had me feeling very emotional. 
 But the story moved me. It's not your ideal love story where everything's wrapped up in the end. It portrayed the elements of life and love. 
 Nicole Krauss' prose is very engaging and delightful. She weaves a story full of humor, sadness, love, loneliness, desperation. You get so engrossed by her words that you just have to keep going. I had a lot of favorite quotes. Quotes that made you stop and think. 
 All in all, it was a very briliant, touching, compelling story. I really liked it.