The Giver

The Giver

By Lois Lowry

Laurel Leaf, 1993. 180 pages. Dystopia.

ISBN: 9780440219071

Reading/Interest Level: Ages 11+

Curriculum ties: Government, leadership

Booktalk Ideas: Perfect life for whom?: Introduce Jonas, explain how his society works and how everyone is assigned jobs. Explain what Jonas’ job means as being the Receiver of Memory, and give one example of a memory that’s been lost, such as color.

Challenge Issues: The scene where Jonas’ father euthanizes a baby may be disturbing.

Challenge Response: First Defense File

Reader’s Annotation:

Eleven-year-old Jonas lives in a society that values sameness to the point that everything is assigned and no choices are necessary. When Jonas is assigned the job of Receiver of Memory, he begins receiving all the memories of the past that have been kept from the population, but can Jonas live with the truths he discovers?

Plot Summary:

Eleven-year-old Jonas is nervous about his upcoming Ceremony of Twelve where he will be assigned a job in the community. At the ceremony, he is given the job of Receiver of Memory, where he will receive the memories of the community’s past, both the wonderful and joyous memories, as well as the painful and hard memories.

The community is one of sameness. They decided on this to help erase pain, war, and emotion. Yet, the memories must be kept alive, so they live inside of one person, the Receiver of Memory, who will experience all the joy and pain that comes with the memories of the past.

Session by session, The Giver gives Jonas the memories that he holds. In the first session, Jonas receives the memory of riding on a sled, one that he enjoys very much. He also starts receiving memories of color and various feelings that he starts experiencing in his daily life. It’s then that he realizes how blank his world is and how much everyone is missing. As much as he wishes he could let others experience his wondrous world, he realizes that knowing such joy also requires knowing pain.

Jonas gets extremely frustrated with others in the community and as he discovers more about what goes on behind the scenes to keep the community in a state of sameness, he no longer feels he can stay.

Critical Evaluation:

Often a reader is aware of more information than the protagonist in the story, but for once the protagonist is in the reader’s position where he knows much more than the rest of his community. Even though Jonas is only twelve-years-old, the memories he receives from The Giver include ones that no twelve-year-old should have of war and extreme pain and suffering. Yet, this is made all the more frustrating because the only person he can talk to about these memories is The Giver. No one else, not even his parents, can understand what Jonas is going through. What’s worse, there is no love. The community is emotionless and not even Jonas’s parents love him. Many teens often feel alone in the world with only perhaps a close friend to talk to about their life. They often feel that parents don’t understand and can’t relate, and that’s exactly what Jonas feels, except they quite literally have absolutely no concept of what Jonas is experiencing. This theme of loneliness is the driving force throughout the book, and the main reason that Jonas takes Gabriel. He wants to save the poor baby not only from death, but also from a life without emotion. He wants Gabriel to grow up and experience all the wonder that everyone else has been robbed of. Jonas is a noble protagonist that is easily likable and relatable.

About the Author:

Lois Lowry is known for her versatility and invention as a writer. She was born in Hawaii and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and Japan. After several years at Brown University, she turned to her family and to writing.

She is the author of more than thirty books for young adults, including the popular Anastasia Krupnik series. She has received countless honors, among them the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader.s Medal, and the Mark Twain Award. She received Newbery Medals for two of her novels, Number the Stars and The Giver. Her first novel, A Summer to Die, was awarded the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award. Ms. Lowry now divides her time between Cambridge and an 1840s farmhouse in Maine.

-from Amazon.com author page-

Justification of Selection:

This novel would work well for low level readers. It has won several awards, including a Newberry Medal, and provides a talking point for teens as they learn to make their own choices and not simply accept what society accepts.