Jonathan Safran Foer’s semi-autobiographical first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, about a man (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) who travels to Ukraine to try to track down the details of his Jewish ancestry, is one of the most brilliant and celebrated novels of the last 20 years. Much of it is narrated by a translator who shows Jonathan around and gets many English words wrong, hilariously. The language of the book is key, and Book-It adaptations always emphasize the language of the original text in a way that other dramatic treatments (and the movie) don’t. by Christopher Frizzelle