Author: Lois Lowry
Publisher: Laurel Leaf (2002)
Media Format: Book
Genre: Dystopian
Selection Source: Text p.24
Reading Audience: 12+
Reading Recommendation: 4 ****
Curriculum Connection: Social Studies
Summary
The Giver is a Dystopian novel for children and young adults. We are introduced to Jonas who lives in a seemingly idyllic society. Everyone gets along. There is no crime. People don't hurt each others' feelings. Families talk about their day at dinner, and discuss their dreams in the morning when they wake up. The reader always has the nagging feeling that the society is too good to be true. The society has many rules, and though the characters in the book don't mind obeying them, they seem silly, if not ominous to the modern, freedom loving, enlightened American. We slowly learn that the characters are not living in an overzealous country club society, but a bio-geo-engineered Dystopia. We find this out, because will has been selected as the receiver. This means that he is honored and burdened by being the one person in the society who holds the memories of the way society was before the "sameness." Will then discovers the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of his idyllic city. He can no longer live with his knowledge, and he is left with only one option.
Evaluation
Great book, easy read, and thought provoking, that's why The Giver is on all sorts of reading lists for young adults. I've reviewed two other Dystopian novels (I know, I'm pushing it), like Feed and unlike A Handmaid's Tale, The Giver does the most important thing a Dystopian novel needs to do, it shows us a terrible society, that we recognize as our own.
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