Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.
I've never read these books, despite having them come up in conversation and in passing many times. The first one was good, but for the most of it I found myself thinking about how cliche it felt. Young Adult Dystopians novels always seem really obsessed with social control. Not that that's a bad thing, and of course that's a set of ideas that is actually really important to young adults. But to me, it made this narrative feel really...trite. I enjoyed the second novel in the series much more.
The story brought up some interesting ideas but most of what's going on is left to the reader's imagination, to fill in the gaps that the author perhaps couldn't on her own.
It doesn't seem believable that euthanasia would be such a large part of their society, but no one knew about it except a select few. Clearly the society was technologically advanced to the point of terraforming the planet and manipulating memories, but if that's the case, why was the ability to "see beyond" or "hear beyond" found randomly in the population? If memory control was so important, wouldn't the succession of Receivers have been engineered to be flawless? Why would memories be released to the general population on death? And what were they seeing and hearing beyond anyway? Genetic modifications that prevented people from perceiving certain things? Or technology-based barriers?
The plan that Jonas and the Giver came …
The story brought up some interesting ideas but most of what's going on is left to the reader's imagination, to fill in the gaps that the author perhaps couldn't on her own.
It doesn't seem believable that euthanasia would be such a large part of their society, but no one knew about it except a select few. Clearly the society was technologically advanced to the point of terraforming the planet and manipulating memories, but if that's the case, why was the ability to "see beyond" or "hear beyond" found randomly in the population? If memory control was so important, wouldn't the succession of Receivers have been engineered to be flawless? Why would memories be released to the general population on death? And what were they seeing and hearing beyond anyway? Genetic modifications that prevented people from perceiving certain things? Or technology-based barriers?
The plan that Jonas and the Giver came up with makes no sense. Jonas was releasing memories to the community along the way. Is it distance based? Did he not need to die to make it happen? And if that's the case, what was the point? How big is this society? If there are other communities aren't there other Receivers?
The whole story is just too vague and the ending followed that trend.
I still remember the feeling I had of reading this while in school, when it was about five years old; I loved it almost immediately, and I credit it with being one of the first novels to make me question the world around me, even if it wasn't apparent at the time. I mean, honestly, I first read this when I was in seventh grade for school. That was sometime in the late 1990s.
I still have a lot of the same feelings for this novel, though now I'm going to be pushing to read the series; I still need to do that.
I love this book, and it's so difficult to really write a lot of why. It's such a simple tale, starting with such a simple frustration: the knowledge that there's more, that there's something else, that one person is meant to be burdened by the knowledge to …
I still remember the feeling I had of reading this while in school, when it was about five years old; I loved it almost immediately, and I credit it with being one of the first novels to make me question the world around me, even if it wasn't apparent at the time. I mean, honestly, I first read this when I was in seventh grade for school. That was sometime in the late 1990s.
I still have a lot of the same feelings for this novel, though now I'm going to be pushing to read the series; I still need to do that.
I love this book, and it's so difficult to really write a lot of why. It's such a simple tale, starting with such a simple frustration: the knowledge that there's more, that there's something else, that one person is meant to be burdened by the knowledge to make life "simpler" for everyone else. And all of that builds up; it builds through simply adding to the knowledge that there was a world before, that there were feelings before, that 'precise language' isn't so precise (nor can it really be), and changing the knowledge of what it really means to be Released.
And all of that spurs action, shows that something can happen in the simplest of actions by the fewest number of people. Even today, I think especially today, this is a message that needs to be heard again and again.
Great setup and tension, fumbled a bit for the ideological simplicity delivered with a heavy hand at the climax, but kudos for the ending and relative skill in illustrating the central message of free will.
Engaging book set in what seems to be a utopia but is slowly revealed to be a dystopia. Not because people are oppressed but because no one is allowed to feel anything extreme or remember anything unpleasant. By turns fascinating and hilarious.
Fun little book. The concept used here, of demonstrating what the world would be like if we could realistically approach some kind of utopic static existence, has certainly been utilized before, such as in the Dune sci-fi series in [book: God Emperor of Dune]. It also kind of reminded me of the movie The Village. It's the old commons vs individualism debate, or protectionism vs freedom.
I think what is interesting about the parable-like simplicity of this book is that the more you think about it, the darker its implications become. On the surface, it is fairly straightforward: we must allow for the freedom of individual choice in order to enjoy true depth of feelings. But remember the pain and burden of The Giver's memories? These are overwhelmingly terrible memories of warfare and suffering. What Lowry seems to suggest is that these terrible aspects of human society are a fundamental …
Fun little book. The concept used here, of demonstrating what the world would be like if we could realistically approach some kind of utopic static existence, has certainly been utilized before, such as in the Dune sci-fi series in [book: God Emperor of Dune]. It also kind of reminded me of the movie The Village. It's the old commons vs individualism debate, or protectionism vs freedom.
I think what is interesting about the parable-like simplicity of this book is that the more you think about it, the darker its implications become. On the surface, it is fairly straightforward: we must allow for the freedom of individual choice in order to enjoy true depth of feelings. But remember the pain and burden of The Giver's memories? These are overwhelmingly terrible memories of warfare and suffering. What Lowry seems to suggest is that these terrible aspects of human society are a fundamental flip side of the coin of deep enjoyment of the most beautiful feelings of love, community, and beauty. That we could not have one without the other, unless we were to endure a shallow, homogeneous existence.
Whether or not this was the author's intent (for all we know, she may have been writing an anti-communist manifesto), it speaks to its artful crafting that it can lead us to deeper insight and understanding through such a simple and deceptively child-like structure.
