The Giver
The Giver quartet, Book 1
Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
Themes: Classics, Dystopias, Spiritual Themes
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Description
Jonas lives in a perfect community, with a perfect family unit of a mother, a father, and a younger sister, who offer support and help him process his daily emotions every evening. He attends school, follows the rules, is polite and courteous, and accepts his punishments for mistakes as a good citizen should. This December, he and his yearmates will enter their twelfth year and receive their job assignments, what they will do for the rest of their working days until it's time to enter the house of the olds and eventually be released to somewhere even better, somewhere none have ever returned from. But at the assembly, something extraordinary happens: instead of a regular job, the Elders Council has selected Jonas to become the new Receiver of Memories. It is the greatest of honors... and, he soon learns, the greatest of burdens. Because there is much more to this perfect community than Jonas ever imagined, and what he learns will change everything he thought he knew - and destroy every shred of happiness he thought he had ever felt.
Review
This is a classic young adult dystopian tale, written before the glut of tales that made the genre a bit played-out
for a while. Aiming for atmosphere and message over plausibility and using Jonas's blindered point of view to present
the world, Lowry creates a seeming utopia in its community of well-behaved people, each knowing their place and
constantly reminded of rules (and corrected for errors or transgressions, first with lashes from a rod and then to more
serious corrections), but who have been stripped of vital elements of their humanity over the generations in the
process. Jonas doesn't even notice the lack, and takes for granted the necessity of sharing dreams with his family (who
are not his birth parents; birthing mothers are actually considered among the lowest of the community, and babies are
raised in a central nursery for their first year before being assigned to couples) and whatever emotions he happened to
feel every evening. When he confesses to strange new feelings, he's relieved that there's a simple daily pill to make
them go away. Even the words the people speak are nitpicked and micromanaged and ultimately rendered close to
meaningless with obsessive precision, stripped of all nuance and depth. Jonas doesn't even mind how his every move is
monitored, his every word listened to, because that's just how the Community helps keep everyone safe and productive
and (what he thinks of as) happy. Neither does he question the concept of "release", or why nobody who is "released" is
ever seen in the Community again.
It is only when Jonas begins training to become the Receiver of Memories that he realizes that the way things are is
not the way they have always been. From the moment the first collective memories of the lost past flow into him, Jonas
begins to wake to the world as it truly is around him, seeing it truly for the first time; even the ability to perceive
color has been stripped from the citizens, a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for how their lives have been deprived of
meaning and beauty in the process of creating a "safe" and conflict-free existence, where no unpleasant sensation or
idea is allowed to linger longer than it takes to pop a pill. Naturally, his new knowledge begins separating him from
his friends - or the kids he thought were his friends - and family - or the people he considers his family. As he
learns what happened to the last apprentice to the Giver, he despairs, even as he becomes more determined to do
something to change things, leading to a drastic action that may save or doom everyone in general and Jonas in
particular.
As mentioned, there are some distinct plausibility issues with the worldbuilding, especially toward the end. Just how
memories are stripped and gathered (and later shared) by the Receiver of Memory is vague, as is how people have been
literally blinded to color (without making them completely colorblind; Jonas's ability to perceive color proves there
are still both rods and cones in human eyes, or at least some human eyes). Likewise, some elements of the ending
really don't make a ton of sense if you think too hard about them. I also raised an eyebrow a bit at the notion that,
in this world, light-eyed people might have some inherent advantage over the dark-eyed majority; anomalously, Jonas
and the Giver (and the previous apprentice) have blue eyes, as does a struggling infant who becomes a plot point.
They all seem to share special gifts that allow for potential enlightenment, while the rest are just mindless sheep
incapable of being roused from their complacent stupor, things that may not even be truly human anymore.
Despite those flaws, the book still has a decent emotional weight to it, conveying Jonas's growing confusion and
horror over just what the community has allowed itself to become, what it has willingly sacrificed, in pursuit of an
ultimately hollow paradise, driven home by a darkly ambiguous ending.