The Giver by Lois Lowry(cover image from Amazon.com)
Bibliography: Lowry, Lois. (2002). The giver. New York: Laurel Leaf. ISBN: 978-0440237686
SUMMARY
Before his 12th birthday, Jonas didn't think much about his life, other than that he enjoyed it. He and his community are happy, safe and comfortable. Every aspect of life is controlled and observed by the strict guidelines and scrutiny of the elders. When Jonas is selected as the community's new Receiver of Memory, he is both fearful and curious about the honor of his position. As the former Receiver, now the Giver, starts showing him memories of things that existed before the community's move to Sameness--color, sound, temperatures, animals, war, pain, love, loss, hope, rage--he has to confront his own feelings of conformity, happiness, injustice and personal choice. Jonas also learns that Release, something he'd been taught was a necessary treatment for the old, the feeble or the unruly, is actually euthanasia. With the help of the Giver, he plans to escape, thus letting loose all of the memories he'd absorbed over the last year and causing upheaval in his community and causing him to say goodbye to everything he's ever known. However, Jonas makes one small change to their plans: he steals Gabriel, a baby scheduled for Release the following morning. Jonas and Gabriel flee their world, facing capture, starvation, hypothermia, and death. The book ends without resolution--it is not clear whether the two boys discover salvation in a new community or if they die.
MY IMPRESSIONS
Lois Lowry's 1994 Newbery winner is yet another immensely popular book that I'd never read. I'd heard about it continually during my tenure at the public library, both due to its permanent position on the neighborhood schools' required reading lists and on the banned book lists through the ALA every year. According to the ALA's website, The Giver is challenged because it contains sexually explicit content, "occult themes" and violence. The first two are baffling to me. The Giver doesn't contain any sex at all. The only time the book is remotely sexual is when Jonas admits to having a dream about his friend Fiona, where he unsuccessfully urges her to take a bath with him. Otherwise, The Giver is an incredibly chaste book--only family members touch each other, and even then it's brief and casual. In fact, the consequence of the bathing dream is that Jonas must take a pill to eliminate any further urges and fantasies. I can only interpret "occult themes" as the mildly science fiction quality to the book and the lack of organized religion in the community. Violence is present, but it's not gratuitous or gory. Death comes as a quiet, bloodless injection, which brings up the real reason The Giver is challenged so much: euthanasia and suicide. (The formerly selected Receiver chooses to "release" herself rather than having someone else do it--her one and only action based in personal choice.) Challengers miss the point of this action in The Giver. Lowry isn't condoning suicide or death. She's merely showing the importance of free will and choice, amplified by a culture without either one.
I LOVED The Giver and am thrilled that a book containing such intense, adult themes won the Newbery Award. (In fact, it sometimes reminded me of this episode of The Twilight Zone.) Lowry writes compelling characters and a believable world. She slowly reveals the magnitude of Sameness in small details--that people can't see color or hear music, that animals don't exist in the community, that no one has memories of any time other than right now. Instead everything is controlled--activities, clothing, occupations, spouses, children. Lowry creates a sense of foreboding from the beginning of the book, and she ramps up the tension and claustrophobic anxiety as Jonas learns more about what his life lacks--for better or worse. Lowry's themes are great metaphors for conformity in middle school children. She pushes the feelings of fitting in, loneliness, nervousness, coming of age, and helplessness to extremes and writes in a way that young adults will understand.
The other thing I really loved about The Giver was that Lowry allows the reader plenty of leeway in deciding how she/he feels about Jonas and his world. The Elders aren't painted as villains, but as leaders attempting to protect their communities from pain, fear, death, chaos. However, in this quest for Sameness, Lowry shows what else is lost--choice, freedom, joy, love, diversity, passion, change. The ambiguous ending echoes the themes in the book--and readers themselves have to decide the outcome of Jonas, Gabriel and the community left behind.
Though I agree that this book is appropriate for school and library discussions, it should be limited to children in middle school or older. The Giver is a mature, complicated, emotionally difficult book to read, even for adults. While Lowry is sensitive in how she treats these themes, it's still a lot for younger kids to understand and articulate. This book could be a potential mine field of issues for librarians leading a book discussion--not just the euthanasia/suicide theme but also personal choice vs. some religious views on fate and God, racism and eugenics, conformity and self esteem.
Winner 1994 Newbery Medal
1996 William Allen White Award
Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
Notable Children's Book (ALA)
100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 (ALA)
Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book
Regina Medal
Booklist Editor's Choice
Best Book of the Year (School Library Journal)
ACTIVITIES
Depending on the age range, sophistication level of reading skills and parental support, The Giver could easily be paired with other utopian/distopian novels in a book discussion. There are numerous young adult books with similar themes: Collins's The Hunger Games, Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It, Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing (a great vampire novel) and his Floodland, Haddix and Nielsen's The Shadow Children series (starting with Among the Hidden), Dunkle's The Sky Inside, Farmer's House of the Scorpion, and many other science fiction titles. Other adult books could also be included (again, depending on the age and skill level of the readers) like Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World.
Pair the The Giver with other young adult Holocaust novels like Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic, The Diary of Anne Frank or many of the books on this bibliography. Nonfiction titles about WWII could be highlighted as well.
Host a creative writing activity to discuss alternate endings to the book. Participants could write the next chapter of The Giver as they imagine it--what happens to the community? Do they give up Sameness? What happens to the Giver? Do Jonas and Gabriel die? If they survive, what is the other community like? Will their lives be better or worse after their escape?
Include The Giver in a display during Banned Books Week. Have a book discussion for patrons on why the book is challenged and its merit as a young adult novel.
REVIEWS
"In the 'ideal' world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are 'released'--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also 'released,' but with no fanfare. Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers."
Publishers Weekly, 1993.
"Jonas lives in a world that many of us have longed for. There is no war, poverty, or family turmoil, and so no fear, no hardship, no everyday discontent, no long-term terror. Jonas is named to the most prestigious and unusual job in the community--the Receiver of Memory. There is only one Receiver, and when he grows old, he trains his successor. Jonas is both puzzled and frightened by his job, which requires him to receive all the memories of their world and the land that lies beyond their community, Elsewhere. Readers lulled by the warmth and safety of the community will find themselves quite surprised as the darkness unfolds them. What the former Receiver, now the Giver, has to tell Jonas rocks the boy's sense of self and turns inside out the life has known. At first, the Giver offers benign memories--of snow, sunshine, and color, things that existed before the community went to Sameness--and the boy grieves for what has been lost. But soon Jonas receives memories of pain and death, and then he is torn. Perhaps his community's decision to shelter the citizens from the world's sorrow has been correct. Yet by going to Sameness, the community has also eliminated all possibilities for choice, and finally, for happiness.
The simplicity and directness of Lowry's writing forces readers to grapple with their own thoughts about this dichotomy; though it is clear what the right answer is, the allure of a life without pain will give even the least philosophical of readers something to ponder. Lowry's ending is the most unsatisfying element of the book. With the book's tension level raised so high, readers want closure, not ambiguity. Anti-Utopian novels have an enduring appeal. This one makes an especially good introduction to the genre because it doesn't load the dice by presenting the idea of a community structured around safety as totally negative. There's a distinctly appealing comfort in sameness that kids--especially junior high kids--will recognize. Yet the choice is clear. Sameness versus freedom, happiness at the risk of pain. Something to talk about."
Rene Cooper from Booklistonline.com
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