I Am The Messenger

Looks like I get to write another review before the spring break ends! Honestly, now I feel like I did something over the break.

This is another book by Markus Zusak, the author of Book Thief. (Which if you haven't read by now, you should check out because I strongly recommend it. The review is under the July 2014 section of my blog) It's been increasingly popular among people in my school and a friend of mine who reads a lot recently told me to read it. I guess I took her word for it and this is where I ended up.

The cover-

Ed Kennedy is a mediocre guy with a pretty mediocre life. He works as a taxi cab driver by day and plays cards with his friends Audrey, Ritchie and Marv by night. Only when he is caught up with a bank robbery and threatened with a gun does his life suddenly change.

After restraining a bank robber and getting the police, Ed starts to find Aces from a deck of cards in his mailbox. They each have different things written on them. Addresses at first. The addresses and names of people in unfortunate situations who very desperately need a hero.

With each card, Ed finds that he can love himself a bit more and embrace the life that he's got, knowing that he's been doing only good things for people. Each new card makes Ed rethink the relationships he has with the people around him and wonder how he can deepen them.

First with his mother and how she always hated him for being like his no-good-always-drunk father. Not in the way that he's going to end up like an alcoholic, but in the way that they were both pretty mediocre and tried to get out of it. Ed's father ended up with an alcohol addiction and Ed isn't really going anywhere. It really seems like he's going nowhere only because his younger brother is on his way to becoming a lawyer and is finishing up his degree in university when Ed barely graduated high school. Obviously his mother is more proud of his brother than him.

Throughout the book, Ed learns that he shouldn't be happy with his mediocrity and should try to get past it to make his mark on the people he cares about.

My thoughts-

The book was so interesting that I read it all in two nights. Well, I stayed up pretty late on both nights, but it was completely worth it. When I got to one page, I had to see the next because Ed's character was developed so realistically that he seemed like a real live person and that I could care about him. The experiences he has can also be related to. The relationship he has with his younger brother Tommy is pretty close to the relationship I have with my brother. Basically, whatever Ed does, Tommy can do much better. My brother is also younger than me and whatever I do, he can always do it and impress people. It makes me also very angry sometimes that even though I am the older one, he can do a lot of things better than me and show that he's really smart or strong or whatever.

This also plays into his relationship with his mother who favors Tommy a lot more than Ed. She finds Ed as a really lazy kid when Tommy is actually "making something of himself". No, actually Ed isn't lazy. It's just in his nature that he won't do that. And whenever he does things for his mother, she never acknowledges him even though it is him who did it and she didn't have to drag Tommy from his high university. Only when he finds out that she despises him for being like their father does their relationship show signs of hope.Yeah sure. And she doesn't hate her older daughter who got pregnant at seventeen years of age? I'd surely hate my kid for that.

The one backstory out of all of Ed's friends that I found the most touching was Marv's. He had got himself a girlfriend a long time ago and at one point, he had gotten her pregnant. When her very conservative father found out, he suddenly packed up their bags and moved his daughter far away from the city, vowing that she would never see Marv again. So Ed finds where Marv's girlfriend is now living and he pushes Marv to stand up to her father and say that he is taking full responsibility for the child. The father reacts badly and beats Marv, breaking his nose and bloodying his face. When Ed stands up on Marv's behalf, he gets the same reaction, but without the violence.

Some days later, Marv's girlfriend gets in Ed's taxi and asks him to pick up Marv so they can go somewhere together. They end up going to the city park where the child asks Marv to play with her. For once, Marv says he feels like a father. He feels like he didn't actually make the wrong choice and that he, Sharon and his daughter Melinda will all live together like a happy family one day.

All throughout, this book was filled with intense feeling. It was either happiness or crushing sadness or something in between, but at every moment in the book you could feel for the characters. Because a book like this could never become the "epitome of mediocrity". It standrs out amongst the other books I have read of the realistic fiction genre because it features very believable characters who want to do good for the people they love and care about. And it shows that good always prevails in the end. No matter how much sorrow, how much suffering you have to go through, happiness always prevails.

((Next up is Inferno! Right after reading Da Vinci Code, I had to read a book for a school project that I'd been putting off for quite a while because I didn't want to leave Langdon and Sophie halfway and start another book. I guess I'll review that one too. There's no rule that says you can't review a book for a school project. Usually I don't like the books chosen for our English projects, but this one stands out.))

Da Vinci Code

Spring break is coming to a close and I wanted to review something during that time. Just so I don't feel like I did nothing during the whole week off from school. And I basically did nothing all throughout the week. Kind of. Just a lot of reading and writing and a lot less substantial stuff that will actually be seen.
My mother was bothering me to watch the movie adaption of this book. She said it's really good and I said I'd watch it if I ever came across in on television or in a store.
In October, during an event at my brother's school, I decided to check out a used book sale that they were having. There was nothing I recognized. Mostly there were adult books and I'm not really interested in that kind of stuff. I am, but adult romance is different from young adult romance and adult action is different from young adult action. Then I remembered this title and decided to get it because I was recommended it.
So, let's just say that stuff happened and I got really busy and I wasn't able to read this book until about two weeks ago when I started it. And I still have not seen the movie, so if it's good, please tell me.

The cover-

When Professor Robert Langdon is in Paris for a lecture, he is woken up and taken to the Louvre museum one night. His escort says nothing about what's going on and he's forced to wonder why he's being taken there.

Langdon sees the body of the murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere and realizes that he is being interrogated as a prime suspect for the murder. Surely he was going to meet with Sauniere to discuss his upcoming novel about the history of pagan worship and the sacred feminine, but never kill him. However, in a note drawn in invisible ink, Sauniere has written "P.S. Find Robert Langdon" which the authorities are interpreting as a clue that this is the murderer.

Langdon is innocent, but no one wants to believe it. That is, until the brilliant cryptographer Sophie comes in with a possible explanation for this. She helps Langdon break out of the thick security of the Louvre and get on the run to find the clues that will help them find out who murdered Sauniere.

After a few stops which involve using the note to break into a Swiss bank and eventually ending up at the doorstep of a good friend of Langdon's, Robert and Sophie realize that they are not just looking for the murderer, but for the one thing that the Church has hidden from the whole world for centuries. And they have to beat a deranged monk and his "Teacher" to the punchline or else the whole world will be left in chaos.

My thoughts-

The whole book was extremely interesting. I slowed down a little bit halfway through because I wanted to process what was going on before I got to the next part. This book tells religion the way it's really supposed to be told and makes light of the little details that the Church always told us to overlook.
But first, let me make one thing clear. I am not of the Christian faith, so I had little to no knowledge of the things that Langdon was describing. They were still interesting in themselves. The hidden symbolism inside each of the paintings we know made me see them in an altogether different way. In fact, I think if I go to Paris now, I'll see things a whole lot differently than I did two years ago.
And also there's the whole matter of the Holy Grail. This is probably the driving force of the book. Sophie and Langdon are in a race with Silas (their enemy they meet later on in the book when he tries to kill them, but they end up tying and gagging him up) and his "Teacher" to get to the Grail and unlock its true power.
I just wonder how long it took to write this book. And how much research it must have taken in order to get all the facts right. Because if there's even one mistake, the Church has a valid reason to challenge him. But I'm no expert on this, so it was all new information to me. I took in everything with wide eyes,
It also made me see the ways that people will go so far as to torture themselves to please God. Even the pain that Silas always felt wearing is cilice (discipline) belt was too much for me. He once described that once his wounds from the barbs had healed, the belt always made his skin feel raw. Any shift in movement sent blood dripping down his legs. I personally am very squeamish when it comes to torture, pain or even blood in general, so I was really bothered by this.
Really, this book exposes the truth about Christianity to the world through a very interesting fictional adventure. It opened my eyes to the things around me and how the Church has tried to erase their mistakes, but has never been quite able to get rid of the evidence completely.

((I'm off to read a book I need to finish for a school project, but I may write a review on it sometime soon. And I've got Inferno, another of Langdon's adventures now in Florence, Italy. I absolutely can't wait to read it! Since the next two weeks are exam weeks, there won't be much schoolwork to take care of and I can read when I get home every day! I suddenly feel like I am the only person who gets excited for exam weeks. Surely the exams are long and boring, but still, our classes get shortened to twenty minutes and the day seems to go by much faster than usual.))