Customer Reviews

The Giver

5 star:		(1,269)
4 star:		(667)
3 star:		(172)
2 star:		(54)
1 star:		(85)

 

 

Try to imagine a huge idea of a team of twisted scientists come to life: solitary, colourless, perfect communities. No one is stressed, no one is hateful, and everyone ACTUALLY uses precise language ( Eh-hem, unlike some places now... ). However, all this changes when one Utopian citizen, Jonas, is selected to "recieve" memories of the past, when pain was inevitable, and love was treasured, not called "obsolete and general."

I am 12-going-on-13, and have read The Giver for 7th Grade. But, oh, how it has touched me. There is something about Lowry's admirable writing that is slightly sci-fi and simple, but extremely beautiful. I've probably read this book 6 times over already, and my teacher has indicated my potential as being a Receiver of Memory, like Jonas ( don't ask ).
This book is UNDENIABLY thought-provoking and an amazing treasure. It will keep you thinking about our world again and again, how such SIMPLE things like hugs and music and COLOUR should be treasured. The Giver definetely deserves 5 stars of 5!
P.S: Read "The Face of Love" by Apple Pie on Fanfiction.net. I SWEAR, you are NOT a Giver fan until you've read it.

I read this book because it was recommended to me by a young man of my acquaintance, who'd read it for school. I read it, and was amazed by the book, which has a very "Brave New World" sort of feel, but the book became ever-so-much better, when I examined it from a Buddhist perspective.

**SPOILER ALERT**

The story begins in an unnamed community, in which the people are living predictable, ordered lives, under a system called Sameness which, as the story unfolds, is revealed more and more to be an illusion (something which in Buddhism is called Samsara). Under Sameness, the community members go about their daily lives, under strict guidelines for behaviour, clothing, and possessions. Each member undergoes annual transitory rites, designating them an age-category, from Newchild, to One, Two, and so-on, until the rank of Twelve. Each stage of their graduation is marked by new clothing, mandated hairstyles, or new possessions, which are also recycled to the upcoming generation, when custom requires it. Age twelve is the point at which each community member is assigned his/her job, and begins training therein.

The story itself centers on a twelve-year-old boy named Jonas, who's been born with a noticeable difference in eye-colour, which marks him as special, from the beginning of the story. In the early part of the story, he begins to notice things about the world around him, which hint at truths beyond those most can see, and he has no words to explain them to his friends.

In the course of his passage rites, Jonas is selected as the new Receiver of Memories'a highly-honoured role in the community, which he later finds out are the community's attempt to stifle the truth about the nature and existence of suffering in the past. Memories are transferred to him from the Giver'the previous Receiver'of hunger, pain, death, violence, and Jonas begins to see the world around him very differently. He sees the violence of death in a childhood game of War, which is'in the community'only an incomplete memory, disbursed into the community, presumably when Jonas's predecessor, a girl named Rosemary, kills herself, unable to bear the truth of all the pain and suffering.

Rosemary's death, though, reveals to the Giver a couple of things about his role (He is a Bodhisattva, delaying his own Liberation, for the good of the community.):
1) The Receiver's role is to guard the community against the truth of suffering.
2) With Rosemary's death, the potential for Liberation-for-All (Nirvana/Nibbana) is revealed to the Giver (in memories of war, revealed in children's games), and he waits to find the next Receiver (Maitreya/Future Buddha).

Jonas, the story's Future Buddha, is exposed to the truth, as was Siddhartha, and recognizes the extremes between the mindless existence of the community-members, and the asceticism represented in the life of the Receiver. With the Giver's help, he comes to an understanding that there's a Middle Way, in which the memories reserved by those filling his role, can be returned to the people, if the Receiver escapes the community.

Giver and Receiver hatch a plan to liberate the community from delusion, and Jonas escapes with Gabriel, a Newchild, into realms beyond the safety and security of the community. In the end, however, he finds that the only truth beyond the Samsara of Sameness is death (through hypothermia). His last act reveals his greatest compassion and Awakening, as he transfers memories of love, warmth, Christmas, family, a sleigh-ride, lights, and a vague memory of Christmas music, to Gabriel, as they lay on the ground, freezing to death. Jonas's memory of music suggests that the Giver has also died, and that his memories of music have been disbursed to the community.

Perfect comdition, recieved fast. Required reading for high school, I have no idea about the content. Hope my son enjoys it better than the last mandatory book he read (Anne Frank).

My class, Scott Bateman Middle School in The Pas, read this book and we thought it was great! It's very different compared to some of the books I have read. I recommend it if you want a book that is kinda like a fantasy book. However, I thought that it should of continued because it seemed like the book didn't end.

The main character Jonas isn't happy with the form of government in his community, so what do you think he will do, run away? Well that was hard to figure out. No suspense or action is to be found in this boring novel.

...
I'm the most bookish member of my family, and the only professional writer (pharmacology, medicine, government regulatory horrors) in the house. As such, I've often been called upon to handle the kids' -- and now the grandkids' -- difficulties with school work. My eldest granddaughter had been tasked with a summer reading assignment centered upon Lois Lowry's novel *The Giver* (1993), and she brought it to me because she was directed to read it with an adult. Her mother and both her grandmothers decided that I'm the adult. Oh, well.

To skip forward a bit, as the granddaughter is now obliged to deal with the wad of photocopied work requirements associated with this book, I've been digging through the Internet to find background on this novel, and some sort of insight into the teacherly impulses so obviously behind the pre-packaged study assignments dumped on the poor kid in June. In the process, I've discovered (to no surprise whatsoever) that there's a massive presence for this horrible thing among the ex-education majors.

Understand, please, that I'm a science fiction fan. I'm thoroughly steeped in the genre. I also get my living through research and analysis, and spotting logical inconsistencies, intellectual sloppiness, and lapses in reasoning is the habit of a lifetime. I also used to read a lot of children's and young adult literature when my children were of an age to plough through such stuff, and I found much of it well-enough written to be pretty admirable.

When I began reading *The Giver* with my granddaughter (who's a bit dyslexic, and needs plenty of help to translate text-on-page into thoughts-in-mind), I kept turning from the contents to the cover, unable to believe that this thing had actually won a Newberry Award. This book was supposed to be on a par with *Maniac Magee*? Or *A Wrinkle in Time*? Or even a second-place finisher like *My Side of the Mountain*? Then I checked out the Newberry Awards list, and took note of more than a decade of Major Suckage in kids' literature (to which, I confess, I've paid not a whole lot of attention in the years between my own kids' growing-up and the rise to reading of my grandchildren).

"Ah," I realized. "John Taylor Gatto's *Dumbing Us Down* with a vengeance. Of course."

*The Giver* falls into a speculative fiction genre commonly known as "the dystopia novel," which includes Ayn Rand's *Anthem* (1938) as one of the earlier examples. To the limitedly literate, Orwell's *1984* is perhaps the best example of this sort of "if this goes on" procedural, drawing horrible future visions from what are supposed to be lucidly reasoned extrapolations of societal ghodawfulness either proposed or actually in train at the time of writing. There are many more examples, one of them being *An Enemy of the State* by fellow physician F. Paul Wilson, written during the galloping inflation of Jimmy Carter's idiotic presidency.

As a dystopia novel, *The Giver* is an example of Extreme Major Suckage. It is fundamentally dishonest as speculative fiction, and Ms. Lowry is wonderfully fortunate in that the majority of children today -- the victims of "dumbed-down" government schools -- are not customarily exposed to books like Alexander Key's *The Forgotten Door* or the juvenile novels written by Robert Heinlein during his contract with Scribners' in the '50s.

(At this point I recommend that the people praising *The Giver* read Heinlein's *Between Planets* [1951] or his *Citizen of the Galaxy* [1957]. Compare Don Harvey of the former book -- or Thorby Baslim of the latter -- to Jonas of *The Giver*, character developed against character, situation contrasted against situation, context versus context, and consider that not only were Heinlein's books written for kids of the same age as my 12-year-old granddaughter but they hit print about 40 years *before* Ms. Lowry published *The Giver*.)

The plenum -- the "world" -- of *The Giver* is logistically untenable. That's a fancy way of saying that it's too damned fragile to survive for any appreciable time as Lowry has described it. Societal systems of such cloying control, if they were liable to a breach such as that effected by Jonas in the story, would have been ripped to shreds long before the events of this novel.

This is an important defect, inasmuch as speculative fiction of both types -- science fiction and fantasy -- relies heavily upon sustaining the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Even with the factitious mental retardation inculcated by government schooling, I don't see much chance that a reasonably rational child of ten or twelve years' age could ever manage to get past the "Sameness" bilge (*Induced* absolute color blindness? Gimme a break!) much less the total suppression of human ingenuity and initiative needed to preserve the sociocultural stasis depicted in this novel.

To put this in context, consider that the average episode of *Spongebob Squarepants* provides a deeper insight into human nature than does *The Giver*. Besides that, the Square One lives in a fantasy plenum -- Bikini Bottom and all the silliness therein -- that's actually better thought-out and more tightly integrated than the community depicted in Ms. Lowry's novel.

I understand why the ex-education majors (the public school teachers) like *The Giver*. After all, it's been "machined" to death with all sorts of off-the-shelf study points and similar pap to be regurgitated by the luckless student (which means that the teachers can stick it to their victims with about as much thought and effort as an oyster expends in getting his lunch), and it's not exactly an intellectual challenge. Education majors, after all, are without doubt the dumbest damned people graduating from college (see cumulative US military Stanford-Binet scores on officer candidates according to undergraduate major subject area; the three lowest-scoring categories every year are education, home economics, and physical education).

Beyond that, though, public school teachers are the most thoroughly "velvet fascist" folks in the country. Think of them as Mussolini's blackshirts with an ostensibly kinder, gentler face -- and a better public relations apparatus. These clowns secretly *admire* the "Sameness" in Ms. Lowry's book, and love to drown the kiddies in noise about how wonderful Jonas' community would be if only the governing thugs weren't as much inclined to have people "released" as is the average Texas politician.

Yeah, right.

...

This is a bit of an basic book, but a good discussion for a Book Club. It is a very quick and easy read; full of interesting thoughts about what a `perfect' society would be like. It had the answers to all of our difficult questions. "What role do I play in society?" "How do we handle heath care?" "Who will look after us when we are old and unable to?" "Will I find a life partner?", etc., etc..

This book is truly a gem. It is a children's book but I feel that it is an excellent read for any age. It is thought provoking, intelligent and it really makes you think about the culture in which we are raised.

I absolutely love this novel. I first read it in grade 6 as a class study and have read it every year since- I am now going into my third year of university. I wanted to have a good copy, a hard cover that will be durable through out the years. Lowry uses and describes a unique world to showcase what the world would be like without pain and suffering and makes one thankful for the suffering they do endure. You can't experience true happiness without harsh pain and Lowry in this novel depicts that fact through a timeless story line.

As a middle school teacher, I have read this book, always aloud, to at least five different classes. Every time it gets to me. This book is a must-read, but it actually needs to be read over again, and talked about. It is fascinating how many different ways the messages in this book can be interpreted. My favourite question at the very end is, "What just happened?". The answers are amazing!