From the back cover, “Nine-year-old Oscar Schell has
embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five
boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious
key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the
morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into
contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious,
and ultimately healing journey.”
The cover is brilliant, not because of the interesting way
the titles go up the fingers, or the visual lines that draw us to the boys eyes
again and again, but because that face is ours. The day the towers fell, we
stood with our hands over our mouths as if hiding could make it all be less
real, less scary, less terrifying.
Just flipping through the book is fascinating. The pages
break every “rule” with blocks of solid text filled with conversations where he
said, “Something,” and someone else said, “something else,” and it all smushes
together without tabs or paragraph breaks—all while giving glimpses of a
beautiful broken boy trying to make sense out of a senseless loss. “Oskar?” “I’m
Okay.” “Don’t go away.”
As the pages flip past, the style changes, becoming all aligned
left, and then spaced out, missing in chunks, and even written on top of each
other. But every broken rule is deliberate, thought provoking, and wonderfully
done.
Interspersed with the text are pictures of locks and keys,
of doors, tattooed hands, and random things, of a man falling from the tower. .
. .
And then the last pages, after the story runs its course,
the same falling man, but with the pages reversed so when you flip them, the
man falls up, not down. Up, up, up—back to when the world made sense, before
everything scary happened extremely loud and incredibly close.
The people we meet in this book are broken, each in their
own way. Their struggle to carry on shines from the pages and we root for them,
pray for them, cover our faces with them.
I cannot read this book without remembering that day, and
how it was for me. I didn’t deal with it well. I know that. You can see previews for the movie they made of this book, but I'm not sure I want to see it. I’ve avoided the
911 movies and specials for more than a decade because I didn’t want to live
through it again, but this book called to me, and for the first time, I was
ready to go back to that day. It feels like a mish-mash of things that shouldn't be real, but are, that have no business being in the same world together.
We woke to the sound of the phone ringing: Mother yelling on
the line, “Turn on the TV; the whole world’s gone to Hell!” We rush to the
television and watch the early breaking news of the tower on fire, struck by a
plane. An accident, a terrible, terrible accident. We watch the smoke and
wonder. My husband dresses for work and leaves. Bye. Love you. Be safe. I watch
the second plane hit the tower. Crash, Boom. The news rewinds it, makes us
watch it a thousand times. Not an accident. Terrorists. My children wake up,
first the baby, then my toddler. I dress for work, it’s harvest time after all.
Time to go pick corn. I should pick the corn, but instead, I gather my babies
on my lap and feed them bottles as we snuggle under the blankets. The Pentagon
is hit, burning. Are you going to pick corn today. Yes. Later, later. There is
a little left from yesterday. The world is burning. Can’t you see? Don’t you
know? A plane went down in a Pennsylvania field. Would you like carrots with
your potatoes today? Yes. Tomatoes too, please. The tower falls. I stand and
cry, my hands over my face, my eyes peeking just over the tips of my fingers. No,
no, no, all those people. Oh, God. Oh, God. Three dozen ears of corn please; I have to go pick
a row. I’m picking corn as the world is burning. How stupid, I think. People are
buried, coated in dust, choking, falling, waving shirts for the helicopters that won’t
save them on the roof, and I’m here. Picking corn. I finish the row, give them
the corn, gather my little ones, and watch the other tower fall. No words. Only
tears. We watch it fall in playbacks. It falls a thousand times.
I still have the VHS tapes of that day. I recorded it. I
will never watch it.
My daughter saw me crying today, as I finished the book, and
said her teacher cried on September 11th last year. Broke down and
told her story in class—that her fiancé was in that tower. That he never got
out. That they were to marry in November of that year. That she will never marry
or find another because we only get one soul mate in this world and that was
him. That was him.
How foolish, I think, that I can live in the middle of a
corn field, thousands of miles away, knowing no one who died, and still feel a
little bit broken from that day. And then I think. Maybe we’re all a little broken
from that day. Maybe that’s what has made this book an international best
seller. We see the broken boy and we want him to be okay. Because if he can be
okay, so can we.
My grandmother remembers Pearl Harbor like a snapshot.
Everything she saw, heard, wore, and ate from that day. My mother remembers
JFK. For me, it is 911. What moment in history affected your life. Did you ever
feel even a little bit broken by events a thousand miles away?
