Amie Rose Rotruck (Children's Literature)
Ed Kennedy has a very uneventful life. Although very well read, by the age of nineteen he drives a cab illegally, spends his free time playing cards with friends, and lives with a dog known as Doorman. Then one day Ed receives a playing card in the mail with three addresses written on it. Ed has been called to be a Messenger and help the people listed on the card in whatever way he can. His help ranges from tasks as simple as spending time with an old woman, to acts of violence against people who threaten his charges (and in one case, against the charge himself), to the hilarious (such as filling up a priest’s church by offering free beer). As Ed helps more and more people, he finds what he lacked before: a purpose. Seeing the affects that he has on other people’s lives, Ed begins to take steps forward within his own life. However, the question of who could possibly be sending these cards still haunts Ed. Zusak has created a completely unique story that explores how the littlest action can affect people’s lives in astounding ways. Ed Kennedy is one of the most engaging un-achievers of literature since Tom Sawyer. His tale will keep you reading and guessing until the very end. 2002, Alfred A Knopf, $16.95. Ages 12 up.

CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices, 2006)
Nineteen-year-old Ed Kennedy is an underage cab driver with no definite plans for the future. He lives in a shack with an aging, flatulent dog. He’s in love with his friend Audrey but can’t bring himself to tell her. And the highlight of his week is playing cards with three other friends who seem as directionless as he. So no one is more surprised than Ed himself when he becomes an unlikely hero during a bank robbery. It helps that the robber was utterly inept. Shortly after, Ed finds an ace of diamonds in his mailbox. On it are written three addresses, each one followed by a time of day. Ed is sure it’s a joke but he takes the bait. Going to the first address at the appointed time—midnight—he sees a man come home and go into his house. Then he hears a woman being brutalized inside. A small child comes out and huddles on the porch, more numb than fearful: clearly this has happened before. At the second address, an elderly woman answers the door. She is living in the past and thinks Ed is her young love, Johnny. At the third address, early in the morning, Ed sees a teenage girl leave her house and go for a run. She is shoeless. Clearly, someone wants Ed to do something in each of these situations . . . but what should he do? And who is that someone? Australian author Markus Zusak’s remarkable novel is provocative, funny, disturbing, tender, hopeful, and, above all, gutsy. Zusak takes extraordinary risks to create a story that challenges readers to think about what is ethical, what is moral, and what is right regarding the choices Ed makes, and to think about the ways the answers to these questions are far from clear. Each time Ed makes his way—sometimes by instinct, sometimes by agony—to a decision on what to do, there is only a brief respite before another ace arrives.There are four aces in all, each with three addresses and three times of day. Each one raises the stakes on the question of who is the sender, and why he or she has chosen Ed to not only bear witness to the lives around him but to make a difference in them as well. Brilliantly constructed, the novel moves closer and closer to the answer by working its way toward the center of the circle that is Ed’s own life. In the end, when the sender of the aces is finally revealed, it is a shocking revelation that leaves Ed having to defend his very existence. He does so, with courage, lust, and defiance, finally embracing the life he once merely let happen in this unforgettable novel. CCBC Category: Fiction for Young Adults. 2005, Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $16.95. Age 14 and older.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2005 (Vol. 73, No. 1))
In this winner of the Australian Children's Book Award for Older Readers, 19-year-old Ed Kennedy slouches through life driving a taxi, playing poker with his buddies, and hanging out with his personable dog, Doorman. The girl he loves just wants to be friends, and his mother constantly insults him, both of which make Ed, an engaging, warm-hearted narrator, feel like a loser. But he starts to overcome his low self-esteem when he foils a bank robbery and then receives a series of messages that lead him to do good deeds. He buys Christmas lights for a poor family, helps a local priest, and forces a rapist out of town. With each act, he feels better about himself and builds a community of friends. The openly sentimental elements are balanced by swearing, some drinking and violence, and edgy friendships. Suspense builds about who is sending the messages, but readers hoping for a satisfying solution to that mystery will be disappointed. Those, however, who like to speculate about the nature of fiction, might enjoy the unlikely, even gimmicky, conclusion. 2005, Knopf, 368p, $16.95. Category: Fiction. Ages 13 up. © 2005 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Paula Rohrlick (KLIATT Review, January 2005 (Vol. 39, No. 1))
Ed Kennedy, a hapless 19-year-old Australian cab driver, has a life that’s going nowhere until he manages to foil a bank robbery. After this incident he starts to receive mysterious messages, written on playing cards, that send him to addresses where people need help: to a house where a husband comes home drunk every night and rapes his wife; to a home where a sweet if senile old woman is lonely and missing her dead husband; to the aid of a teenage runner who lacks confidence; to a church that needs a congregation. In the end, Ed is even sent to fix his friends’ lives, and in the process of helping others discovers that he has now become “full of purpose rather than incompetence.” But who is sending these messages to him, and why? The answer is surprising (though not entirely credible, I thought), but it’s the journey, and Ed’s narration, that will delight the reader, and perhaps provoke some thought, too, about the value of helping others. Originally published in Australia as The Messenger, this novel by the gifted young author of Fighting Ruben Wolfe and Getting the Girl received the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award. Told in the present tense by Ed, it’s funny, engrossing, and suspenseful, and it will appeal to a wide audience. Category: Hardcover Fiction. KLIATT Codes: SA*--Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, 2005, Random House, Knopf, 368p., $16.95 and $18.99. Ages 15 to adult.

Catherine M. Andronik (Library Media Connection, November/December 2005)
I wouldn't mind seeing every high school senior (or very recent graduate) who sits moaning that one young person can't change the world and there's just nothing productive to do in his or her little town (or big city) read this book. Ed, age 19 and eeking out a living of sorts as an underage cab driver in a small Australian town, is heading for the same end as his recently deceased ne'er-do-well father. He has his 15 minutes of fame awkwardly foiling a bank robbery and suddenly begins to receive cryptic messages on playing card aces. A mysterious someone is directing him to involve himself directly, sometimes very dangerously, and sometimes tenderly, but always for the ultimate good, in the lives of complete strangers. Then he gets the last ace, and the recipients of his actions are no longer strangers. They are his long-standing best mates, and they need him and his newfound strength and perceptiveness in ways he'd never realized before. If this sounds like heavy reading, it's far from it. The early-adult soul searching is touched with plenty of humor, including one of the great dog characters in recent young adult literature. The themes and some rough language make this most appropriate for older teens, but the ones on the cusp of adulthood are the ones who need this message most. Highly Recommended. 2005, Alfred A. Knopf (Random House), 357pp., $16.95 hc. Ages 16 up.

Deborah Stevenson (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, January 2005 (Vol. 58, No. 5))
It's not unusual for literature to examine the issue of making one's life meaningful or to explore the question of our impact on one another. It is, however, unusual for such topics to be addressed directly rather than obliquely, and interestingly rather than sententiously, and for this to happen in a book aimed at young readers. Nonetheless, Australian writer Markus Zusak has managed it, and, if you'll pardon what will soon become apparent is a pun, he does it in spades. Ed Kennedy is living a largely purposeless life--at nineteen, he's an underage cabdriver with no particular ambitions--with his largely purposeless cabdriver friends when his life takes a strange and unexpected turn. For no reason that he can figure, he's chosen as a messenger, receiving in the mail a playing card--an ace from each suit in turn--and some cryptic information that he must pursue and interpret in order to find his mission and intervene in the lives of the selected individuals. Some of these missions are joyful--he brings an old woman reassurance from her long-dead husband and encourages a shy teenaged girl to believe in her own worth; some are simple--he buys an overwhelmed single mother the ice-cream cone she's never able to indulge herself in; some are harsh--he must stop a man's nightly assault on his wife and bring a young tough into the fold of his hard-edged family. The stakes soon escalate, though, when he comes to the most intimidating suit, hearts, and he's asked to undertake missions that involve his friends and that shatter the complacently breezy exteriors that they've all shown each other ("How well do we really let ourselves know each other?"), laying bare the truth behind the "No worries, mate" facades. Finally, the hardest message of all comes--the joker, which has as its subject Ed himself. Zusak, author of Fighting Ruben Wolfe (BCCB 3/01), has always been excellent at writing about young men who can't see the possibilities for the limitations, and he outdoes himself here: Ed's aimless floating is completely understandable, in terms of his family and character ("æWho knows you real well, Ed?' And that's just it. æNo one,' I say"), but it's also poignant for the same reasons. His yearning for his colleague Audrey, the closest he comes to having an ambition, seems as hopeless as the stalled lives of his friends, and there's rueful humor in the fact that his closest confidante is an aging and repulsively smelly dog. The vignettes of Ed's visitations, on the other hand, are exquisitely wrought, whether they're tender or brutal, and they're woven together into a human-scale demonstration of chaos theory, making a passionate case for the importance of even small personal connections. Ed's voice is compelling, by turns exultant, as he feels he's mastered his missions and expanded himself thereby, and fearful, as he's led further into taking the risks of personal exposure and commitment he and his friends have self-protectively avoided, cheapening their lives as a consequence. The revelation of the architect of Ed's mission isn't as compelling as the mission itself, but that's almost inevitable with such an elaborately constructed mystery. The book still succeeds in being a touching and intriguing exploration of the need to live one's life significantly, to value the richness knowing one another brings along with its terrible vulnerability. And in that respect, Ed Kennedy truly is the messenger, conveying an important message that will speak volumes to many young adult readers. (Imprint information appears under Zusak's I Am the Messenger.) (Reviewed from galleys) Review Code: R* -- Denotes books of special distinction. (c) Copyright 2005, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2005, Knopf, 368p, $16.95 and $18.99. Grades 9-12.

Horn Book (The Horn Book Guide, Fall 2005)
Days after halting a bungled bank robbery, Ed Kennedy receives a playing card in the mail with three addresses written on it. As he visits each location, the aimless nineteen-year-old cabbie discovers troubled occupants in desperate need of assistance and finds a sense of purpose in his own directionless life. The laid-back, dryly humorous first-person voice is engaging and unsentimental. Category: Older Fiction. 2005, Knopf, 359pp, 16.95, 18.99. Ages 12 to 14. Rating: 2: Superior, well above average.

Patrick Jones (VOYA, February 2005 (Vol. 27, No. 6))
It is no wonder that Zusak's wild ride of a novel won the Children's Book Council of Australia 2003 Book of the Year for Older Readers and the Ethel Turner Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for 2003. This dense literary novel is heavy on plotting, secondary characters (including a great dog named The Doorman), and belated coming-of-age anguish, all pulled together with the dazzling first person, sometimes sentence-fragmented voice of Ed Kennedy. Nineteen-year-old Ed is a cabbie who seems more a passenger in life than a participant. After foiling a robbery, Ed gets his fifteen minutes of fame, and then the first card arrives. Ed receives playing cards, four aces and a joker, that contain an address or a clue to an address at which Ed will find a person in need. These situations vary, from a harried mother who merely needs an ice cream to a priest who needs his church filled to a brutal husband who needs to be killed, but in each case, Ed must figure out the message that he is called upon to deliver or the need he must fill. It is a book of small riddles and minor triumphs but also of crushing disappointment as the messages get closer to Ed's broken past and his loveable yet lacking friends. Although the curtain pulling at the book's finale is more of a whimper than a bang, Ed's journey into secret lives is so emotional and intellectually challenging that older readers will enjoy the trip. VOYA CODES: 4Q 3P S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Will appeal with pushing; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2005, Knopf, 368p., $16.95 and PLB $18.99. Ages 15 to 18.