Author: Lois Lowry
Length: 225 pages
Year Written: 1993
Why I chose this book: Like the last book, this one was recommended to me by my friend Kevin (which means it will be a great, meaningful book that I absolutely love).
Long after Brave New World, but years before The Hunger Games trilogy, Lois Lowry wrote this brilliant, powerful, yet simple story about many of the same dystopian visions that seem to recur throughout popular literature. The Giver is a kid's book, but relevant to all ages. For those unfamiliar with Aldous Huxley's masterpiece Brave New World, it is about a society where babies are bred for particular careers, and everyone is too doped up on a drug called "soma" to ever consider the bigger picture, or even the existence of one. People are generally more familiar with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, in which kids aged 12 through 18 are entered into an annual drawing where boy and one girl are selected from each of the 12 districts to fight in an arena (though more like a complete ecosystem) until one survivor remains. The Giver is not as complex as Brave, nor as violent as Hunger, but much more moving than either.
The main character, Jonas, is a young boy who lives in a community where everything is rigid and controlled. Births are regulated to 50 per year, and each "newchild" is closely monitored so that on their twelfth birthday (which occurs as a mass ceremony every December) they can receive a job assignment from the community's elders, for which they immediately start their training. Though many kids already know what they will be assigned, because of their expressed interests and hobbies, Jonas has no idea what he will get. So, of course, he gets assigned a mystical, prestigious, but super mysterious and scary job: Receiver of Memory. Essentially, his job is to hold all the memories of the world so that everyone else doesn't have to. This turns out to be, like, the biggest gift/curse combo you could ever imagine.
Jonas goes through about a year of very painful self-discovery and newfound awareness, which all culminates in a simple, slightly unfinished ending. Lowry's reserved, elegant style of writing definitely add to the pleasure of reading this story. Moreover, it gives us highly relevant but perhaps uncomfortable food for thought.
Rating: 9.7/10
