Lots of Questions, Few Answers in The Giver


Veronice Roth’s Divergent series and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy come to mind while reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver. In all of these books, there is a fictional world where children are asked to do the impossible, and they in some way rebel against expectations.

In The Giver, Jonas is born into a Utopian society, birthed by a woman specifically tasked with bearing children for the community, and given to his family unit for rearing. At the age of 12, the society’s children are given their assignments-the jobs they will have for the rest of their lives. Jonas is given the unique job of the Receiver, and will be trained by the one and only other receiver/giver. The older receiver, an elderly and exhausted man, has been collecting all the memories from the society, holding them to himself, so as not to upset the rest of the population with feelings like pain, loneliness, and loss.

The society is supposedly perfect, but Jonas doesn’t think so. He thinks his people should feel all the feelings that the receiver, and soon he, keep for them. When he learns that his people kill unhealthy children and the elderly when they are no longer useful, his inner-conflict begins.

Lowry’s first book in her four-part “Giver quartet,” published in 1993, predates those by Collins and Roth, and is a brief romp through Jonas’s world. Lowry does an enviable job of quickly setting up the parameters of Jonas’s environment, establishing Jonas’s original place in it, and quickly letting him fall into doubt about how perfect the world is, as it is.

Thank you to the Boston Public Library for suggesting The Giver as part of its summer reading program.


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