You can always find a reason for a road trip. Whether you've got your dead aunt strapped to the roof of the car, or you're pushing a VW bus across the country to get to a beauty pageant, or you're stuck in the backseat with a frisky, farting dog trying to find your grandfather's village which was wiped off the map during World War II, well, you're bound to get some good pictures for your Facebook wall out of it.

Everything is Illuminated tells the story of a Jewish vegetarian writer named Jonathan Safran Foer (how did the author of this book, the Jewish vegetarian writer Jonathan Safran Foer, cook up that character?), who is on a journey to find his grandfather's hometown and the woman who saved him during World War II. He's assisted by Alex, a Ukrainian translator with a loose grasp on the English language; Alex's grandfather; and their frisky, farting dog, Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior.

As Alex might say, this is a very premium tale.

Jonathan Safran Foer was only twenty-five when Everything is Illuminated was published. (What are you waiting for?) It was a New York Times Bestseller, an Amazon.com Best Book pick; it won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 2001 and The Guardian awarded it their First Book Award in 2002. And then the book was made into a film directed by Liev Schreiber a.k.a. Mr. Naomi Watts and starred Elijah Wood and that guy from the Gypsy punk rock band Gogol Bordello.

But Foer didn't rest on his laurels. He then wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was also made into a movie; Eating Animals, the book that prompted Natalie Portman to become vegan; and edited an English translation of the Haggadah, a Jewish tale as old as time. So, yeah, this guy knows his stuff when it comes to Jewish folklore, vegetarianism, and storytelling.

Still, not everyone is a Foer #1 fan. His second book didn't get nearly the same favorable reviews, and one scholar accused Foer of distorting the facts, especially when it came to Ukrainian treatment of Jews. He was also named one of Anis Shivani's "15 Most Overrated Contemporary Authors." (You know you've made it when people start calling you overrated.)

So is Illuminated illuminating or infuriating? You'll have to grab a copy for yourself and find out.

World War II. The Holocaust. If you've read or watched one story about 'em, you've seen 'em all, right? From Schindler's List and The Reader to Night, Slaughterhouse-Five, Unbroken, and The Book Thief, these are all basically the same story over and over again.

Well, maybe not so much. We're not talking vampires or werewolves, here. We're talking a huge and violent event that changed the world forever. There might not even be a finite number of stories to tell from this global catastrophe.

Everything is Illuminated belongs on the shelf next to the classics. It tells a story (just one story of many) about the atrocities of World War II from the perspective of someone who didn't live through it and is searching for meaning in the stories of his family who did. Everything Is Illuminated asks a lot of hard questions: Who gets to tell the story of what happened? How do we bear witness to tragedy? How do individual stories fit into the larger narrative?

And, most importantly, how do we separate truth from legend—and when does the difference stop mattering?