Book Report: The Messenger

(I Am) The Messenger
By Mark Zusak


From the back cover:
Meet Ed Kennedy--cab driving prodigy, pathetic card player and useless at sex. He lives in a suburban shack, shares coffee with his dog, the Doorman, and he's in nervous-love with Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence--until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery.
That's when the first ace turns up.
That's when Ed becomes the messenger.
Chosen to care, he makes his way through town, helping and hurting (where necessary) until only one question remains. Who's behind Ed's mission?



First paragraph:
The gunman, is useless.
I know it.
He knows it.
The whole bank knows it.
Even my best mate Marvin knows it and he's more useless than the gunman.

I adore this book. I adore Markus Zusak. I adore Caroline for gifting me this book.

In The Messenger, the words flow over the pages with heartbreaking beauty and sharp humor and bits of slowly-unfolding puzzle. After a spur of the moment action turns Ed into a mild, short-lived celebrity, he gets a playing card in the mail, the Ace of Diamonds. On it are three addresses, each with a time. Ed tries to forget about it--the weirdness of it--but eventually finds himself in front of the first address, a house, at midnight. What he witnesses there is brutal and painful, and he wonders if the other two addresses hold the same sort of terrible fate. Days pass and after Ed works through his shock, he goes to the second address.

"I was quite relieved, to tell you the truth, because nothing really happened at all. The only person there was an old woman who has no curtains on her windows. She was in there on her own, making her dinner and sitting there, eating, and drinking tea.
I think she ate a salad and some soup.
And loneliness.
She ate that, too."

After watching the old woman for a few days, Ed decides to make a move. He's not really sure what he's doing, other than it's obvious that this woman is lonely. He buys a cake and just as she's preparing for another solitary dinner, knocks on her door.

"Her footsteps climb to the door. Her feet sound like the tick-tock of a clock. Counting time to this moment.
She stands. She looks up at me, and for a moment, we both get lost in each other. She wonders who I am, but only for a split second. Then, with stunning realization clambering across her face, she smiles at me. She smiles with such incredible warmth and says, "I knew you'd come, Jimmy." She steps towards me and hugs me hard, her soft, wrinkled arms encasing me. "I knew you'd come."

Ed becomes a regular at Milla's place. The tenderness between them squeezed my heart--the first of many times in this story. The third address on the card is a similar case--a young girl who needs confidence, and after much watching and thinking, Ed is able to deliver. Now it's back to the first address, to a problem that will not be resolved with cake or a shoe box. This house requires more assertion, more aggressiveness--this house requires a gun. Ed accepts the challenge because the outcome is worth it; after all, he must protect the Diamonds.

I love the cryptic-ness of the card delivery, and the feel-good moments Ed experiences when he is able to give these random strangers what they need. This story is very much Pay It Forward, except in it's own way, better. Maybe even a pinch of Boondock Saints in here, too.

"He drops his spoon and says, "I have something to tell you, Ed."
I also stop. "Yes, Father?"
"You know, they say that there are countless saints who have nothing to do with church and almost no knowledge of God. But they say God walks with those people without them ever knowing it." His eyes are inside mine now, followed by the words. "You're one of those people, Ed. It's an honor to know you."
I'm stunned. I've been called a lot of things many times--but nobody has ever told me it's an honor to know me. I suddenly remember Sophie asking if I was a saint, and me replying that I'm just another stupid human.
This time, I allow myself to hear it.
"Thanks, Father," I say.
"The pleasure's mine."

Ed's journey is to go from a carefree, future-less cab driver to being something more. With each successful mission, his confidence is boosted and he continues to care about these people, long after they are 'fixed.' He realizes that he wants more from life.

"I go back through town and visit my father's grave and stay there a long time. From the cemetery, I see a small glow that's the fire, and I sit there, looking at the gravestone with my father's name on it. I cried at his funeral. I let the tears trample my face in complete silence, guilty that I couldn't even summon the courage to speak about him. I knew everyone there was only thinking about what a drunk he was, while I was remembering the other things as well.
'He was a gentleman,' I whisper now.
If only I could have said that on the day, I think, because my father never had a bad word for anybody, or a true act of unkindness. Certainly, he never achieved much, and he disappointed my mother with broken promises, but I don't think he deserved not a word from anyone in his family that day.
'I'm sorry,' I tell him now,as I get up to leave. 'I'm so sorry, Dad.'
I walk away, afraid.
Afraid, because I don't want my own funeral to be that forlorn and empty.
I want words at my funeral.
But I guess that means you need life in your life."



"It's impeccable how brutal the truth can be at times. You can only admire it.
Usually, we walk around, constantly believing ourselves. 'I'm okay,' we say. 'I'm alright.' But sometimes the truth arrives on you, and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."

This is a feel-good book about a normal if not down-trodden character who overcomes his own worst enemy--himself--and emerges on the other side a better person. The emotions are very strong and lingering, very inspiring for one to take a moment's notice of the people around them in their own life and see if you can't make someone else's day just a little better. I'd have preferred this story to end one chapter earlier, for I am not fond of the author being present in their own story, but it does not ruin the overall enjoyment. This is a quick read and I think it's better that way--makes the impact more concentrated and memorable. The imagery is gorgeous, the characters real and unique, the pacing steady. Emotion rules these pages, though, as I doubt anyone could read this and not be warmed.

Five out of Five stars for eliciting strong emotions and casting a stone of hope and initiative to an audience normally too young to care.

Book Report: Bringing Out The Dead

Bringing Out The Dead
By Joe Connelly

From Back Cover:
In a narrative that moves with the furious energy of an ambulance run, we follow Frank Pierce, a paramedic in New York's Hell's Kitchen, through two days and nights: into the excitement and dread of the calls; the mad humor that keeps the medics afloat; the memories, distant and recent, through which Frank reminds himself why he became a medic and tries, in vain, to convince himself to give it up. And we are with him as he faces his newest ghost: the resurrected patient, whose demands to be released into death might be the most sensible thing Frank has heard in months, if only he would listen.

First sentence:
I parked the ambulance in front of Hell's Kitchen walk-up number 414 and Larry and I pulled equipment from the back.


First off, one of the aspects of this book I am going to praise most is the imagery. When I searched amazon.com for a link to this book, I discovered a movie had been made, which floored me because several times while reading, I thought how great of a movie it would be. And, discovering Nicholas Cage plays the leading role floors me even more because there truly is no one more fitted--he matches exactly the image of tortured Frank Pierce I had built in my mind. I am in love with this book and am very curious to see if the movie is comparable.

Let me just say right now, this book has earned five very brightly shining stars out of five. A passage from Frank's POV:

"I was nineteen when I decided to become a medic, drive an ambulance. Perfect. Save lives and see the front lines, help the people who had stuck it out in the city I dreamed about. At the time, I believed the only way to avoid regret was to wrap my life completely in the present, in a succession of quick, kind acts, and no job seemed more suited to the moment than medic. Only much later did I realize I had chosen my parents' careers, a bus-driving nurse and a nursing driver.
"I was good at my job; there were even periods when my hands moved with a speed and skill that were beyond me and my mind worked with a cool authority I had never known. I would scrap with depression, I drank too much, but every once in a while I participated in a miracle, breathing life back into a young asthmatic, holding a tiny just-born jewel in my hands.
"But in the last year I had started to lose that control. I'd always had nightmares, but now the ghosts didn't wait for me to sleep. My wife left. I drank every day. Help others and you help yourself, that was my motto, but I hadn't saved anyone in months. It seemed all my patients were dying, everything I touched turned to shit. I waited, sure the sickness would break, tomorrow night, the next call, feeling the bottom fall away."



Joe Connelly worked as a medic for nine years, and he has played his knowledge perfectly. The movements and procedure are exact and vivid and technical, but also fluid and avoid sounding like a textbook.

"I put the mask over Burke's face and squeezed the bag, though my heart wasn't in it, hadn't been in a long time, and neither was Mr. Burke's, whose EKG rhythm on the monitor was a flat green line. The spirit was gone. Standing by the window. It we did manage to jump-start his heart, there'd be only blood to fill it.
"But my hands took over; they always do: trained on hundreds of cardiac arrests, they're automatic. I pulled out the long steel laryngoscope blade and inserted it into his mouth. Using it like a lever, I lifted the tongue up until I found the white vocal cords, like Roman columns, and I grabbed the thick plastic tube and carefully passed it through those gates, through the dark cartilage of the trachea, into the branched entrance of the lungs. I secured it, hooked the bag up to the tube, and pumped it hard."



The characters in this book are outstanding. Each person, both patient and fellow medic, is unique, and each plays a very different, symbolic role in Frank's life.

"We came to a jawbreaking stop in the middle of Forty-second Street and I jumped out, jumped into traffic just happy to get out, but when I saw our patient I jumped back in. We needed no further information. It was Noel, running toward me, his face soaked with blood.
" "Noel," I yelled, but he kept coming, bent low with his arms spread out like a linebacker. He had sliced up a tire and fastened pieces with string over his shoulders. Tin soup cans circled his wrists and ankles. One hand held a broken forty-ouncer, the other, a stringless violin. "Noel," I cried one last time, and then I locked the door and rolled the window up moments before his face struck it, almost breaking both. "Kill me," he cried. "Kill me, please." Blood clotted in his hair, matting in large clumps to his scalp. Bright-red blood dropped from his ears and ran freely down his neck. He beat the glass, yelling between blows. "You must kill me. No one else will. Please help."

"It was two years since we'd worked together, when he broke all crash records. I remembered sitting in the back of the ambulance treating a very bad asthmatic, Marcus driving us to the hospital. The trip took a very long time, even for Marcus, who always stopped for every red light, and at some point I realized we weren't moving, that in fact we hadn't moved for the equivalent of at least five red lights. I looked out the door, to see Marcus picking up his Chinese food. "The place was closing," he said. "If I don't take care of myself first, how am I gonna take care of anyone else?"


The cast of characters is large but organic and toward the end, their symbolism becomes clear. They each mean something, representing a part of Frank or a part of life itself, and how Frank deals with them reflects his inner arc. There is a smartness to the intricacies that held me captivated and thinking till the very last word.

And speaking of intricacies, Connelly really brought this book to life by using small details:
"I was born in the same hospital I was taking Burke to die in, Our Lady of Mercy, Fifty-sixth Street between Ninth and Tenth, but those who worked there, or were unfortunate enough to be treated there, called it Our Lady of Misery, or simply Misery. My father, who was also born in Misery, never referred to the place as anything except the butcher shop, following an appendectomy in which the surgeon left a sponge under his colon."

"The guard was no more helpful. He had taped a white square around his station and placed a sign on his desk: 'Please Stand Behind the White Line. Thank You.' With his dark glasses on and his arms crossed over the great wall of his chest, the guard ignored everyone outside the line. To those that crossed he growled, 'Don't make me take my glasses off.' He always gave them the option of not making him take his glasses off, for if the shades did have to come down, someone would be bounced, off the floor, the wall, even the street. A good bouncing could keep the crowd quiet up to an hour."

"Bus number eighty-six sat in the far corner, leaning somewhat, as if a great hand had crumpled it and tossed it there, a monument to too many red lights run, too many broadsides and head-ons, too many cracked-up drivers. The sides and front were chewed with dents, and a municipal-brown rust spread like a rash from the hood to the pitted lower panels. The rear bumper lay in a pile of broken parts nearby. Franco, the bus that would not die. In the dark he looked like an abandoned furnace."


This book races and sparkles, going for your throat with the first page and not letting go till the very end. There are just way too many things I love about this book--something on every page. To know this is a first novel is daunting. The pacing is perfect, the material fresh and unique and real. There is humor and sadness and blood and brains but also new life and discovery.

"Tom walked calmly around the front. I locked the door. "Get out," he said. "Get out of the bus."
"I got you good." I imitated the whistle.
"Yeah you got me. You're a psycho. Now come on. One minute I think you're going for suicide, the next it's partnercide. Unfit to command this vehicle."
"But Tom, I'm cured. The fight fixed me. Let's do some jobs."
"You look like someone who just stepped out of a three-day firefight. You ought to look in the mirror, Father Frank."
"Don't call me Father Frank. I've changed. Call me Frank Evil. Heartless Frank."
"You're a bleeding heart, Frank. You can't help it. That's what you are."
"I'm bled out, Tom; can't bleed without blood. And then the heart stops."
"All right, Frank Evil. It's your turn to get the coffee."


"I turned on the overhead flashers and headed for the jumper, 530 West Forty-eighth Street, 16M, Cy Coate's place. Who needed a dispatcher? I knew where I was headed. I rested my head on the back of the seat and let Franco idle forward. Left on Tenth, left again on Fifty-third, then charging down Eleventh at a walking pace. Every day is Judgment Day, I thought, the end is always here. I was starting to sound like Mr. Burke. There is no tomorrow. Tomorrow is right now. How many times have you died, Frank? How many times come back? I turned on the sirens and stopped under another red light.
"We have a call?" Tom asked.
"We're dispatching ourselves," I said. "Jumper, Forty-eighth Street, Ten to Eleven."
Tom, still breathing heavily, was waving his left arm forward, as if that would make me go faster. "Come on. You driving to a jumper down or a garage sale?"
"A jumper sale. A garage down. There's always tomorrow, Tom. You can't go too slow."
"I think you're having a bit of a relapse, Father. Now I gotta go recount the bottles of rubbing alcohol."


Five out of five stars for humor, detail, characterization, imagery, originality, character growth and symbolism, and for the sheer ability to captivate. Joe Connelly, you have a new fan for life.

Book Report: Rule of the Bone

Book report: Rule of the Bone
By Russell Banks

'Flunking out of school and already hooked on drugs, the 14-year-old narrator, secretly molested by his stepfather, emotionally abandoned by his weak mother, leaves his mobile home in the depressed upstate New York community of Au Sable and becomes a homeless mall rat. In a burst of bravado, he acquires a crossed bones tattoo, changes his name from Chappie to Bone, and attempts to find some focus in his dead-end existence. Convinced that he is destined for a criminal career, Bone vents his anger in acts of senseless destruction. His vulnerability and his need for love and direction are fused when he and a seven-year-old waif he has rescued from a pedophile take refuge in an abandoned school bus with an illegal alien from Jamaica called I-Man, whose Rastafarian wisdom and gentle demeanor are fed by liberal consumption of marijuana, which he deals.'
-Publisher's Weekly


First Sentence:
"You'll probably think I'm making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I'm not."



This story opens with fourteen year old Chappie alone in his 'family's' trailer, playing hooky from school, watching MTV with the pet cat Willie. Out of boredom, Chappie begins to snoop through their meager possessions, and stumbles across two things of interest in his parent's closet: a high-powered rifle and a suitcase full of rare old coins. He assembles the gun and picks out targets on the street: a small boy, elderly neighbors, even Willie. As Willie stretches out to lick the end of the barrel, Chappie pulls the trigger. The safety is on. Chappie realizes what he is trying to do and becomes upset, feeling guilty and scared. His reaction is what earns him my empathy, and thus the reader/character bond begins.
And there is a long road ahead.
This was a long story. 390 pages of tight font and run-on sentences, heavily submersed in the viewpoint of a male teenager. We follow Chappie's slow destruction as he deals marijuana, shoplifts, gets kicked out of his family's home and moves in with a group of coke-snorting, electronics-stealing bikers. After a freak accident burns down the apartment, Chappie and his slightly older friend Russ hit the streets on their own and eventually wind up at an empty summer house in the mountains. They live there for weeks, eating all the food, burning the furniture for heat, keeping all the windows boarded up and staying inside so as not to give away their presence. When the cramped space drives a wedge between the friends, Russ heads back home to his aunt while Chappie, feeling betrayed and angry, heads out on his own.
Next he meets I-Man, a middle-aged Jamaican man living in a dilapidated school bus, living off the land and praying to spirits Chappie (now called Bone) has never heard of. He stays for months and learns a new, self-reliant way of living, develops a sense of right and wrong, learns generosity and to avoid gluttony. He does chores to earn his keep and has a true interest in learning I-Man's history and inner workings. But then one day I-Man tells Bone that he wants to go back home to Jamaica. Bone is saddened; he doesn't want to stay and live alone, but he doesn't know if he should follow. He decides to wait for a sign from the Jamaican God, and ends up following I-Man from New York to Jamaica.
And this is only the half-way point.



Likes

I liked how this book is the epitome of 'show don't tell'. This story slowly unravels and the reader is given the co-pilot seat, right in the front row as Bone experiences both gains and losses. Bone is one of the best characters I've ever met--he is well balanced and three dimensional and incredibly insightful. At the start, despite the drugs and alcohol and abuse, still possesses an innocence that as the story progresses, he loses. Or maybe not loses, but learns to ignore. In the first quarter of this book, Bone sees a 7 year old in possession of a child molester and tries to intervene, to distract the man and save her, even send her back home to her parents. And at the end of this story, Bone watches as two children suffer silently under their parent's coldness to each other--and he does not act. This is the first book I've read where the character came out (in some ways, at least) worse than when he started. Or has he? Is this not the law of nature and growing up? Do we not ALL lose our innocence?

The ending is sad, almost a tragedy, laced with just the tiniest strand of hope. What an amazing character arc.


Dislikes


It is when Bone follows I-Man to Jamaica that the story loses credibility. Though the drug-permeated Jamaican milieu is portrayed with impressive authenticity, the improbability of Bone's macabre adventures there frays the plot's believability. The novel's strengths are diluted by its excesses: too many descriptions of marijuana highs, too many coincidences. It becomes too grandiose.

The first person narrative, while intimate and necessary, is 90 percent mile-long run-on sentences that would have an English teacher cringing. The Jamaican dialect is strong and I couldn't figure it all out, but I think that might have been the point and I got better the more I read.



Yet one finishes the book with indelible sympathy for tough-guy Bone, touched by his loneliness, fear and desperation, and having absorbed Banks's message: that (as he said recently), society's failure to save its children is "the main unrecognized tragedy of our time."'

Four and a half stars out of Five for unforgettable characters, taking me new places, and giving me plenty to think about. I would read more by Russell Banks.