The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver, by Lois Lowry, first published by Houghton Mifflin, USA, 1993. My edition: Harper Collins Essential Modern Classics, 2008.

The Giver was first published in 1993, a time when I was working at the Ministry of Education and not necessarily keeping up with current YA fiction. Despite the fact that it won the Newbury Medal I didn't get around to buying a copy until 2008, and it had been sitting on my 'to be read' pile ever since! Now that a film adaptation has been made there is renewed interest in the book and one of my Year 10 students recently recommended it to me. Since I have a rule of never seeing a movie until I have read the book (if I can possibly avoid it), it seemed a good time to move this book from the TBR pile and actually read it.

Dystopic fiction is such a pervasive genre in Young Adult fiction today that I needed to remind myself that the story and scenario would have been a lot fresher in 1993, 15 years before The Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched, etc. Jonas' anxious wait for his adult work assignment preceded all these.

Plot-wise the only thing I thought was stretching plausibility slightly was the way that Jonas' father

was permitted to take keep the baby overnight at their home on such an extended basis. While a necessary plot element to provide the final spur for Jonas' flight, it seemed to me that a society with such regimented family relationships and rules around emotion would have been alert to the dangers of attachment. I don't think making the whole family sign a disclaimer would really have cut it!

I liked the growing relationship between Jonas and the Giver, as the latter begins to pass on the memories and Jonas begins to feel real emotion for the first time. I particularly like the way the Giver identifies his feeling for Jonas as love and sees himself as a parent to him early on.

As one would expect from such a well-estabished, award-winning author, Lois Lowry's style is seamless and the neologisms she creates to describe the society are skillfully integrated into the narrative in a way which makes them seem logical and inevitable, as well as simultaneously shocking us by their difference: Elevens, newchildren, Assignment, the evening telling of feelings, and so forth. The description of 'release' and the stories the children are told about what happens, are later starkly contrasted with the ugly reality which so shocks Jonas.

My Year 10 enthusiast has urged me to read the sequels to this novel which, seeing as I enjoyed The Giver very much, will not be a hardship.