Nineteen-year-old cabbie Ed Kennedy has little in life to be proud of: his dad died of alcoholism, and he and his mom have few prospects for success. He has little to do except share a run-down apartment with his faithful yet smelly dog, drive his taxi, and play cards and drink with his amiable yet similarly washed-up friends. Then, after he stops a bank robbery, Ed begins receiving anonymous messages marked in code on playing cards in the mail, and almost immediately his life begins to swerve off its beaten-down path. Usually the messages instruct him to be at a certain address at a certain time. So with nothing to lose, Ed embarks on a series of missions as random as a toss of dice: sometimes daredevil, sometimes heartwarmingly safe. He rescues a woman from nightly rape by her husband. He brings a congregation to an abandoned parish. The ease with which he achieves results vacillates between facile and dangerous, and Ed's search for meaning drives him to complete every task. But the true driving force behind the novel itself is readers' knowledge that behind every turn looms the unknown presence - either good or evil - of the person or persons sending the messages. Zusak's characters, styling, and conversations are believably unpretentious, well conceived, and appropriately raw. Together, these key elements fuse into an enigmatically dark, almost film-noir atmosphere where unknowingly lost Ed Kennedy stumbles onto a mystery - or series of mysteries - that could very well make or break his life.

---
I loved "The Book Thief" by this author, so I wanted to try another one of his books.

currently reading and reserved for concertina8 afterwards (and maybe Karschtl after that)

LOVED it! I'm glad I "found" Zusak, he's one of the better ones out there at the moment and I hope he has a brilliant future ahead of him.

Handing ot over to concertina8 ASAP.

I have high expectations!

---

Loved it!

Had me tear up more than once.

Thanks for the book! Hope I can read it sometime soon.
----------------------------------
My Review: April 2015

Until the very end I still didn't really understand why Ed had to do all these things, and how it all came together. Bit confusing for me. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed reading about the different adventures and about all the ppl whose lifes Ed changed - sometimes dramatically, sometimes only with a small gesture like buying an icecream. The moral is probably that everyone can change the lifes of apparrent strangers around them. It's just very rare that somebody really does that. Or isn't it?

Given to a friend!