The Giver (Giver Quartet, #1)

by Lois Lowry

[clementine]

I loved The Giver the first time I read it at age 10 or 11, and again when we read it in school at age 13. I think it's the first dystopian I ever read, and it does have a lot of the quintessential qualities I look for in a good dystopian. I've always loved how the characters perceive their society to be perfect (and, indeed, the only possible way to live), when it's rather obvious to the reader that it's disturbingly devoid of so many of the things we consider fundamentally important as humans.

This book brings up a lot of really interesting questions, questions that I grappled with as a kid and that I'm still thinking about. I think the most interesting thing to me is whether it's worth sacrificing love, emotion, and meaning for order and stability. I think no, but in the world of The Giver, society obviously moved away from this mindset. This question is echoed in Lauren Oliver's Delirium series, where the feeling of love is eliminated from society in order to create some sense of order. It's an interesting concept to explore, and one that is deeply tied to our sense of humanity.

My biggest issue with this book is that the characters are just not old enough. It's not believable to me that a twelve-year-old child would be given such responsibility or even behave in the way that he does. My cousin is coming up to that age, and she's very mature for her age, and, NO, I cannot imagine her in this role. It would make so much more sense all around for this society's coming of age to be at sixteen, for so many reasons. This is the thing that trips me up with this book. I also think some of the ideas could have been explored more fully, but in general I think it's a book that's both conceptually really strong and interesting in terms of plot, characters, etc.