Another three for Dan

I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak: Underaged cab driver Ed Kennedy 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 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. 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 buys a poor family new christmas light to light up their house, and their lives. But after all the things he does, the last question is who is sending the messages, and why? The person sends gangsters to beat him up. So apparently they don't care much about his well-being, but do care about these random people living on Glory Road (no that has nothing to do with the movie : ) , it was just the only address from the book I could remember) etc. Anyway, it was great! Very action packed. I'm in to action books lately, as you will see, since 2 out of the 3 are action books. Also, it kind of reminded me of the M. Night Shyalaman movie Unbreakable because of how he just had this instinct of what to do. Only on the first card out of four did they tell him exactly where to go, on the remaining three he had to figure it out on his own, and then every time he just knew what he needed to do to help the people he was sent to. It was great!

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum: This is A LOT different from the movie. It had this assassin named Carlos that was going after Jason Bourne because Jason wasn't really Jason his name is Daniel Webb and he was hired by Treadstone to pretend to be an assassin so they could arrest Carlos. And (I'm just going to assume you've all seen the movie) the thing with Marie is WAY different. Instead of paying her for a ride he kidnaps her, and then the assassins going after him "rescue" her and then get him and then they're going to go kill her but Jason saves her after he kills the guys that were going to kill him. So that's why they fall in love. Anyway, it's action packed and all that jazz :) Pretty darn sweet!

The Simple Gift by Steven Herrick: A free-verse novel told in three voices. Billy, 16, says good riddance to his abusive father and hops a freight train. Settling in a small town in Australia that has a friendly librarian and a train yard with abandoned cars to call home. He adjusts quickly to life as a bum, figuring out how to eat and keep clean. Intelligent and mature, the teen thinks about cruelty, compassion, and what his life has become–"I'm poor, homeless, but I'm not stupid." He meets and falls in love with Caitlin, a rich and dissatisfied girl who quickly sees there is more to Billy than a starving bum grabbing leftovers off the tables in McDonald's. He also befriends Old Bill, a homeless drunk who teaches him a few things, including how to earn money. Billy has little to offer but compassion, and that's what these two people so desperately need. All three of them are able to give the simplest gifts to one another in this beautiful, subtle, and sensitive story. (If you couldn't tell I totally stole that thing from amazon haha). So, it's fantastic! It was a really quick read, since it was all written poem style. Free-verse though, so it was like reading a book but shorter. It turned out that Old Bill isn't really a bum, he only wants to be. He has a house, but his daughter fell out of a tree and died, and a year later his wife died in a drunk driving accident. So he doesn't want to live in his house anymore. So when the welfare guys come around asking where Billy lives, they tell them Old Bill's address. Billy moves in, and Caitlin comes often to make dinner..and there is also some love scenes indirectly portrayed. Anywho it was pretty darn good :)