Title:
The Giver
Author: Lois Lowry
ISBN: 9780553571338
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Copyright: 1993
Genre: Science Fiction
Age
Range: 13 - 17
Reader’s Annotation: Jonas will learn about life, love, and
tragedy as the Receiver of Memories when he and the Giver try to revive the
past in the community’s minds.
Plot Summary: An eleven year old Jonas is nervous about the
Ceremony where he will be assigned his job. Privacy is not allowed in his
tightly controlled society. Everyone complies with them. Jonas accepts his
assignment as the Receiver of Memories. He is told that he will be isolated by
his family and have both pain and pleasure as he absorbs the memories from the
old Receiver who now calls himself the Giver. They both share uncommonly pale
blue eyes. The positive memories are absorbed first including: color, sunshine,
rainbows, and many other common experiences in our world. He is also given the
atrocities of the past: pain, famine, death, war, and loneliness. These are the
memories before the Community was formed. The Community created the social
dynamic of sameness where the members give away their memories to the Receiver
to keep the society tempered.
There is no
war, suffering or hunger in the Community, there is also no music, love, or
color. The Elders control who will marry, who your children will be, and what
job, like Receiver, you are assigned. With all this truth, Jonas longs to live
away from the Community in the Elsewhere. Jonas completes his reception of
memories when he asks the Giver what is meant by release. He shows Jonas a
recording of his father killing the smaller of a set of identical twins. The
second child violates the societal rules of sameness and is discarded like
trash. The baby has been released.
Jonas and
the Giver believe it is time for the Community to change. The people must have
their memories returned to them. The Giver wants Jonas to escape while he helps
people cope with their memories. They will either deal with them or destroy
each other. The Giver plans to ration his food and water for Jonas as they
stage his drowning and subsequent escape to the Elsewhere. The plan is changed
when Jonas learns that the baby Gabriel his family has been given will be
released the next day. Jonas must now save the baby and escape the Community.
Critical Evaluation: The
Giver is a highly awarded book. In 1994, it won the Newberry Medal and the
Regina Medal. The American Library Association has listed it as one of the Best
Book for Young Adults, ALA Notable Children's Book, and 100 Most Frequently
Challenged Books of 1990–2000. It is also a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, Booklist
Editors' Choice, and School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. The Giver is often a book that is found
in the classroom. It is in the same genre as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but it is specifically written for the
young adult audience. It teaches children to take a look at the people who
govern. Encouraging them to ask the hard questions and make choices of their
own. While it has been accused of being unrealistic by adult critics, The
Giver is a valuable piece of literature to have in a collection.
Author Information: From the time I was eight or nine, I
wanted to be a writer. Writing was what I liked best in school; it was what I
did best in school.
I was a solitary child, born the middle of three, who lived
in the world of books and my own imagination. There are some children, and I
was this kind of child, who are introverts and love to read — who prefer to
curl up with a book than to hang out with friends or play at the ball field.
Children like that begin to develop a feeling for language and for story. And
that was true for me — that's how I became a writer.
My books have varied in content and in style. Yet it seems
to me that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the
importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, is a
fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of
such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era,
tells of the same things: the role that we humans play in the lives of our
fellow beings.
The Giver takes place against the background of yet another
very different culture and time. Though broader in scope than my earlier books,
it nonetheless speaks to the same concern: the vital need for humans to be
aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world
and its environment.
I use the Anastasia books to make myself laugh and to
lighten up between serious books. But I also use them to deal with serious
topics in a different way, disguised by humor.
I think it is my own children, all of them grown now, who
have caused me to expand my view. One of my sons was a fighter pilot in the
United States Air Force; as a mother during the Gulf War, I was newly stunned
into fear for the world and a heightened awareness of the necessity to find a
way to end conflict. One of my daughters has become disabled as a result of the
disease of the central nervous system; through her, I have a new and passionate
awareness of the importance of human connections that transcend physical
differences.
And I have grandchildren now. For them, I feel a greater
urgency to do what I can to convey the knowledge that we live intertwined on
this planet and that our future as human beings depends upon our caring more,
and doing more, for one another. Source -
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/contributor/lois-lowry
Curriculum Ties: History, Political Science
Challenge Issues: Violence; Anti-Government
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