Bookclub Bitches 11: I am the Messenger and the message is, I suck at endings
For the April edition of Bookclub Bitches, FFJ and I read I am the Messenger by Markus Zuzak. This is one of those books that I was pretty much enjoying in a kind of mindless way until the very end where it pissed me off so much that it made me totally pick apart everything that came before. I am the Messenger is about Ed Kennedy a sort of ne’er do well 19-year-old cab driver somewhere in Australia who inadvertently foils a bank robbery and becomes a local celebrity for about seven minutes. Right about that time Ed gets an ace of diamonds in the mail with three addresses and times scrawled on it. Ed’s job is to figure out what the hell is going on and what the card means. Once he gets through all the diamonds, he gets an ace of spades, then clubs, then hearts, get it? Anyway, the big mystery is who is behind these cards. It’s what draws you through a novel which has a tendency to be a bit sentimental and altogether too sacharine.
Sadly you never really get to know what’s behind Ed’s mystery because the ending totally fucks over the reader in a way that is unforgivable. It’s just bad form to throw the entire believability of your story and get all meta on the last page. It’s shitty and will piss people off. You can imagine how the podcast goes.
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