The Giver by Lois Lowery

The Giver by Lois Lowery


This was another one I read for my Children's Literature class.

The Giver started out feeling like it belonged to the same category of books as The Hunger Games trilogy and the Uglies series. By the end I was thinking it still may be but it seems there are more books to this story so I am not 100% sure.


A perfect community devoid of any differentness is where this story takes place. Everything is planned, right down to when a child learns to sleep through the night. It is even decided what the exact right age for having a bicycle is, 9 by the way.

What unfolds is that to achieve this there is no color, emotion, music or love. Is this better? Are people better off not remembering these things? This community decides yes since it also means no hate, pain, war, anger, hunger, or discontent. 

There is one person who holds all the memories of these things to spare the people them but keeps them himself in order to have the needed memories and the wisdom they provide in order to provide guidance to the community when asked.

Then comes Jonas. And everything begins to change.

I liked this book, a lot. I don't know if I loved it but it was very, very good and very thought provoking. But now I feel I need to read the rest of the books in this series, The Quartet series which follows The Giver with Gathering Blue, Messenger and concludes with Son.

(finished March 23, 2013)