Book Review: The Giver

The Giver, a 1993 novel by Lois Lowry, I would classify as a work of speculative fiction. It is an engrossing and beautifully written tale aimed mainly at youth and young adult readers. And yet it succeeds in touching the hearts and challenging the minds of mature readers as well.

The Giver was recommended to me (and bought for me at a Salvation Army thrift store by my sweet daughter, BTW) very highly as a story that would captivate and expand my imagination; it certainly did that. The storyline made me compare it to such films as The Island as well as books I've enjoyed such as Brave New World and That Hideous Strength. However, this book has the advantage of being exceedingly readable and inviting in its straightforward style and accessible characters.

Jonas, the hero of the tale, is a 12-year-old member of a centuries-old future society. His is a community that has been thoroughly planned and controlled for countless generations. Children are named and assigned to particular family units by the dictates of the community's ruling body. Every child is raised by his or her parents according to highly structured and enforced rules, and when each child reaches the age of 12 (adulthood), the community leaders assign him or her to the particular role in society best suited to his or her abilities. Everyone in the community seems content, healthy, well provided-for and secure. But...

Jonas, unlike any of the other 12-year-olds in his group, has been singled out for a unique and dubious "honor" of becoming the community's new Receiver of Memory. What exactly this entails and what it means for Jonas in particular, is what the book is really all about.

The old Receiver of Memory is nearing the age when he will retire--or "be released" in the book's terminology. He becomes Jonas's mentor and eventually a kind of grandfather figure who opens his eyes to realities that Jonas never imagined. Realities that society at large has, with the passage of time and its own complacency with the status quo, forgotten about entirely.

Another book that comes to mind when considering The Giver is Flowers for Algernon, which charts the journey of a man named Charley, who is given a surgical procedure that increases his mental abilities to that of a genius. Jonas's journey introduces him to new information that increases both his pleasure and his pain exponentially and, at the same time, makes him, in the reader's mind and heart, more fully human.

The Giver took me on a journey along with the main character--one that explored the contours and composition of what it means to be human. It asks serious questions about why we value the things we do, why the experiences of pleasure and pain are so important to us, the ethical implications of an overly controlled society, and many others. It forced me to ask once again "what do I really want, expect, and long for in life here on earth...and in the life to come?"

Jonas's previous life, the changes that occur to him, and the heroic choices he is forced to make at the end of his journey, involve freedom and bondage, responsibility and conscience, life and death, and a force he finally comes to reckon with...love.

Here is a link for Lois Lowry's book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Giver-Readers-Circle-Laurel-Leaf/dp/0440237688