I Am the Messenger: Markus Zusak

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I think the first thing that pulled me in was that Ed is a lot like I was at nineteen. I like to think I had a little more confidence but I had no idea what I wanted to do either and I'm reasonably sure I was secretly in love with a girl who was only interested in being friends at the time as well. And hell, I'm damn sure I would have taken up the messenger role like Ed did had I gotten playing cards in the mail.

In that respect, I am the Messenger is utterly different from The Book Thief - it won't make you curl up in bed and cry your eyes out. But that doesn't mean it's any less magnificent a book. The Book Thief is one of my favorite books ever (if not my favorite book ever), then how is it possible that I loved I Am the Messenger even more? One last remark that I want to mention is the question of righteousness. In the story, Ed does various things to deliver the messages that will in the end up bettering peoples’ lives, bettering humanity. My issue does not concern the “positive” acts but the once in which he employs violence. Whenever something like this happens in a story, I just find myself questioning what is right and wrong. Because who are we to decide what message needs delivering? Who are we to decide how someone else should live? Who are we to pass judgment? Of course the results in the novel are purely positive, but I couldn’t help but wonder if what Ed was doing really was the best course of action. In 2015 the novel was adapted for stage by Xavier Hazard and Archie Stapleton and performed by the Redfoot Youth Theatre Company in Perth, Western Australia. [4] Television [ edit ] Both the ending and the entire book is unrealistic, concocted and too simplified making it childish in tone. The story is drawn as a mystery. The things that happen just would not happen! I would recommend the book to young teenagers not looking for realism, who love mysteries and a dash of romance.Ed sees a plethora of quandaries and concerns, and along with him we see it with a shattering clarity which I must attribute to his perspicacity. Mental dejection and Physical abuse. Smothering solitude or inundating also-rans. Lost love and lost purposes and scabrous violence.

Ed: * stumbles along, hands shielding his head from the anticipated blow yours truly is half tempted to give him but won’t because dammit he’s too adorable* OK OK I’M GOING no need to get all violent now, is there? But Messenger is also about living—living not as dragging our feet from one day to the next, breathing a dying air, prancing through a life monotonous and blind, no, living as cleaning the distorted glass, putting on our glasses to clear our hazy sight and truly seeing ourselves and surroundings. So many of us float through life, thinking we are right where we want to be, and so many of us are wrong, a quietly burning candle of dissatisfaction deep in our guts. No, we don’t need to do something grand to matter, to have lived; all we need is to look where we never have, see what we’d never seen, ask all we’d never asked, and find our purpose—even if it is planting smiles on the lips of the old woman you walk past every day. In my opinion, the author didn't try at all to make any of the side characters have any kind of layers. This was most obvious in how Ed's mother was portrayed. I have the feeling that Zusak decided that she's is a bad mother, and that was that. He didn't try to show another side of her or try to explain her stand point. So she made her react badly and overly upset about every little thing. It was so incredibly over the top and ridiculous. An Aesop: "If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did for all those people, well, maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of." He also acts too sexual towards an underage girl, for my liking. He didn't even interact too much with her, but when he did, it left me feeling uncomfortable.Ed Kennedy is a nobody. An underage cab driver in a small town, he goes to work, plays cards with his friends Ritchie, Marv and Audrey, hangs out with his dog The Doorman; and this is his life. Choosing a favorite quote this time was just like choosing a favorite child, but there was one I needed to share: Taxi driver. Local loser. Cornerstone of mediocrity. Sexual midget. Pathetic cardplayer. And now weird-shit magnet on top of it. Ed: Oh wait you were asking about me? Sorry I kinda stopped listening the moment you said Edward cause I first had to establish the basics haha we good?