Reading The Giver is cold heat, a really good use of mental bandwidth that forces you to come to terms with the contradictions of life.
Lois Lowry's most acclaimed book deserves all the accolades. The writing has simplistic depth that will challenge anyone under the age of ten, but strengthen their vocabulary. It does this without skillful use of short sentences and precision vocabulary.
Even though the story is told through the perspective of twelve-year-old Jonas, the themes are adult. Memory, responsibility, communism, the ethics of death, it doesn't turn away from any of these. But what I enjoyed most is that it never shouts at you, nor does it overindulge in literary layers of abstract symbolism; it just tells the story and leaves the reader to decide what to focus on. I admire that.
The story is slow to start, because everything seems so... ordinary. We meet Jonas, his family, friends, and learn about the strange community he lives in. Then everything gets upended after Jonas's "selection." From there the book dives into the mystical, divine, only to end with hard physical reality and an ambiguous ending.
I'm not sure why I'm writing this as a spoiler-free afterthoughts. You might have read this book in school and only recall the parts you have to summarize in a book report. But I'm telling you there's much more here than a pre-teen can comprehend.
I read that this book is banned in many schools across the U.S. It took me a stretch of imagination to think about why. The conclusion, I decided, was that in some ways it could be interpreted as an anti-Christian book. Even though there are no direct mentions of Christianity or any religion, I could see how a (SPOILER) society that has been robbed of memory and literally can't see color, could map to any religion, and how a boy who glimpses the horror of what keeps his society so peaceful, and flees from it, could be seen as the wrong message to teach to kids.
But to be real, that's a stretch.
I was happy that the original Giver's power to transfer memories (which became Jonas's power) didn't become the focus of the story. If this book were written today, I feel like the story would have been obsessed with Jonas's specialness. But ultimately the book took the risk to tell a bigger story in just a hundred or so pages.
That's my biggest takeaway from reading The Giver: that you can tell a tight story, with depth, aimed at children, in a small package. If you haven't read this in awhile, I highly recommend you revisit it.
