Sergeant Cat reviewed The Giver by Lois Lowry
Review of 'The Giver' on 'GoodReads'
2 stars
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.