The Giver

shannon20 - The giver: “The giver” is a story about a controlled society, where there is no feeling, no pain, no suffering, no music and color,no love and no choices, but only sameness. “The Elders” decide who you marry to, whom you adopt as children, and a job will be assigned to you. Jonas has been selected to become “The Receiver of Memory”, and he is the only one who knows what the real world is like, beside his teacher. But Jonas will feel how the people in the real world feel. The reason Jonas has been picked to be the giver is because he has intelligence, integrity, courage, and wisdom, and most of all, "The Capacity to See Beyond." During training, Jonas started to know the truth, which they were controlled unfairly, and realized the community has murdered sick infants, old people, and those who broke the rules. Therefore, together with the giver, his teacher, they decided to break the rules and change the future of everyone I think “the giver is a creative and interesting story because it showed that how freedom is important to us. If you can’t make decision for yourself, or love whoever you want, what is the purpose of living? I could hardly forget when Jonas learned about love, he asked his parents “Do you love me?” For me, I rather have to face the pain than lose feelings, because that’s how life is interesting!

April 26, 1993
In the ``ideal'' world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are ``released''--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also ``released,'' but with no fanfare. Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers. Ages 12-14.