Genre:
Young Adult
Young Adult
Science Fiction/Dystopian
Series:
Giver, #1
Publish Date:
April 26, 1993
Synopsis:
In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world and struggles against the weight of its hypocrisy. With echoes of Brave New World, in this 1994 Newbery Medal winner, Lowry examines the idea that people might freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable society. Gradually Jonas learns just how costly this ordered and pain-free society can be, and boldly decides he cannot pay the price.
The Giver is set in a future society which is at first presented as a utopia and gradually appears more and more dystopic, so could therefore be considered anti-utopian. The novel follows a boy named Jonas through the twelfth year of his life. Jonas' society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to "Sameness", a plan which has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of "Receiver of Memory," the person who stores all the memories of the time before Sameness, in case they are ever needed to aid in decisions that others lack the experience to make. As Jonas receives the memories from his predecessor—the "Giver"—he discovers how shallow his community's life has become.
The Giver series
(covers link to Goodreads)
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**About the Author**
I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three. My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad; together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets; and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.
Because my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. I was born in Hawaii, and moved from there to New York, where I began school. When the war began, Dad had to go overseas, and Mother took us back to the town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she had grown up and where my grandparents lived. I finished elementary school there and during the summer following sixth grade we moved to Tokyo, where I went through seventh and eighth grades. I graduated from high school in New York city, but by the time I went to college, Brown University in Rhode Island, my family was living in Washington, D.C.
I married young. I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. California. Connecticut (a daughter born there). Florida (a son). South Carolina. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter; another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow.
My children grew up in Maine. So did I. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.
After my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I met Martin and we spent thirty happy years together, traveling the world but equally happy just sitting on the porch with the New York Times crossword puzzle! Sadly, Martin died in the spring of 2011. Today I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living alone and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Alfie and a funny little cat named Lulu. But a very happy part of my time is spent as well in Maine, in a 1768 farmhouse surrounded by meadows and flower gardens, and often with visiting grandchildren.
My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.
The Giver - and the two books that follow it and make a trilogy (soon to be a quartet! I've just finished the fourth book!), Gathering Blue and Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though they are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.
My older son was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. His death in the cockpit of a warplane left a little girl fatherless and tore away a piece of my world. But it left me, too, with a wish to honor him by joining the many others trying to find a way to end conflict on this very fragile earth.
I am a grandmother now. For my own grandchildren - and for all those of their generation - I try, through writing, to convey my passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends upon our caring more, and doing more, for one another.
Stacy connected with Lois Lowry
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*My Thoughts*
The Giver is a simple yet moving read and the start to Lois Lowry’s quartet. This book was recommended to me by a classmate after a discussion about different types of communities. The community in The Giver is a utopia where everything and everyone is the same, everything is orderly, and everyone simply obeys. Life in the Community is simple, everything is predetermined by a council, from a person’s spouse to their occupation and their time of release, their form of death by poison. The book is told in the third person with a boy named Jonas as its main character. He is a twelve-year-old boy that does not appear to be special compared to his classmates. He also lives in the Community without question. He relies on the Community to live and to continue his life without strife. It isn’t until his special Assignment of Receiver that Jonas begins to understand the world better. In The Giver the reader will experience life as Jonas does and the reader will also begin to understand that the Community isn’t as perfect as it appears to be.
Lowry’s way of writing gradually changes Jonas’s character and sews the people in Jonas’s life into the messages of the story. Each memory that Jonas receives is vividly described and it brings life into his monochrome days. It is like Jonas and the reader are discovering that life is meant to be lived and enjoyed, something that is easily overlooked, that feelings are empowering. If someone were to break up a game of catch, they must apologize with a predetermined phrase, “I apologize for breaking up our game of catch.” If the infraction were much worse, the person would be released, a kinder way of saying executed. Adolescents take medication to suppress their emotions and adults don’t know what love is because it is not a precise word. Lois Lowry’s The Giver is a great read for teenagers and young adults to experience a dull world where any extreme words, feelings, actions, or any form of disruption to the peace are unacceptable.
When Jonas begins training and learning from the Giver to be the next Receiver of Memory, he learns about different sensations, about a world outside of the Community, how to feel, and especially how to love. Throughout The Giver, Jonas learns what being alive really means. During Jonas’s training, his family unit takes in a baby named Gabriel for extra care before he is given to his family unit and Jonas learns that real value of family. With Jonas’s new role and memories he receives from the Giver, he learns how to care for others, fear the tragedy of war, and the pain of losing a loved one. It changes Jonas to where he can see colors and his emotions are augmented instead of suppressed. He understands how to think for himself and make his own decisions. He can’t stand to live in a world that doesn’t care about individuality or even humanity. With the powers of the Receiver in the Community such as being allowed to lie or access records only meant for the council, Jonas slowly learns that he must leave the Community.
It is a simple story with a powerful message, that leaves the reader hoping for more, to see Jonas succeed, and move past the Community. It reminds the reader that peace is nice but that they are also human, that not everything can be tidy, orderly, or easy.
My rating:
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