I first read Lowry's The Giver about a decade ago in a Children's Literature class during my undergraduate studies. I've read it dozens of times since. It ranks high on my list of powerful, tantalizing works of children's literature. Perhaps that speaks critically of the breadth of my reading. Nevertheless, it is my first reviewed Newbery.
A quick note on my plan for these reviews; I won’t be summarizing the books; I will assume you have either read the book or will check out the resources listed at the end to get a summary. Also, this will not be a formal literary critique; rather a shotgun blast of what moved me.
On to the book….
First lines are determinative. When I open a book, I am physically giddy at reading the first sentence. A powerful first line starts the car and helps me drive through rough spots to the end of the book; a weak line, however, stalls my progress. A long-standing favorite first comes from C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Stubbs,
and he almost deserved it.”
With those simple words, “he almost deserved it” Lewis foreshadows everything about Eustace Clarence Stubbs that you come to understand through the subsequent pages.
Lowry does the same in The Giver.
“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”
Why is Jonas frightened of December? From the get-go, Lowry presents Jonas as a wordsmith who is always looking for just the right way to describe something. Perhaps I relate more than some because I am, as my wife can vouch, a cesspool of useless knowledge, especially with words.
I relate to the society’s emphasis on “precision of language” and Jonas’ own obsession with finding just the right word. Ironically, it is this “precision” that is the impetus for his gradual disillusionment of his society and slow-growing sight at the realities of the dystopian around him.
I want to dig further into the element of language because it is what I believe makes The Giver so powerful rather than dynamic action or characters; although it has both. Through the phenomena of “Sameness”, the community is insulated from truly experiencing pain, love, joy, sadness or any such emotion that makes us human, forming an emotional baseline for the story. The characters use many emotionally laden words like “angry,” “happy,” and “starving,” but they carry no meaning. I felt my own emotion leached the longer I spent in “Sameness”.
But when Jonas is selected to be the next Receiver of Memory, he begins to experience real emotions and we experience them as well. Jonas feels the exhilaration of a sled ride, the unconditional love of a true family, and the despair of dying on a battlefield — forgotten and damned.
For the first time in the book, real emotions are laid out before the reader, raw and unfiltered. Jonas has no culturally defined reaction to these events so he responds with unfiltered honesty. When I read those passages, my emotional Richter scale spiked. The banal baseline created in the first half of the book heightened these emotional plateaus in ways not achievable in most other books.
Lowry takes simple things like snow, hills and family and heightens them in such a way to deconstruct the foundations of Jonas’ society. In doing this, she tackles such controversial topics (especially in a 9-12 year old chapter book) like abortion, euthanasia and choice.
I really don’t want to get into this much, but Lowry’s book has made the banned books list every year since it has been published. I only suggest that, perhaps, the very people objecting to The Giver because of the “adult” issues it deals with and the way they are dealt with are themselves attempting modern-day “Sameness” in the same way as the Elders in The Giver did back and back and back....
I recommend you read Gathering Blue and The Messenger, which form a loose trilogy with The Giver.
Suggested Resources
Buy it - Amazon