A Review of The Giver by Lois Lowry

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. 192 pages.

Jonas lives in a world very different from our own. In the Community, everything is controlled and managed, and the people live by explicit rules and guidelines to ensure sameness. Everything is shared from thoughts to food, and the peaceful world is devoid of any sort of pain or desire. Everyone contributes to the Community through his or her assigned duty designated at the Ceremony of the Twelve, which signifies a child’s Coming of Age and start of training for his or her assigned duty. At Jonas’s Ceremony of the Twelve, he receives the great honor of becoming the next Receiver of Memories and begins training with the current Receiver, who asks that Jonas call him The Giver. The Giver informs Jonas that his training will consist of receiving the memories passed down from each of the past Receivers, memories of how the world used to be before the time of sameness. Very quickly Jonas learns of all the feelings and ideas that have been lost in the Community—color, animals, weather, as well as pain and true love. Being exposed to these things causes Jonas to become aware of all that is missing in the Community, as he and The Giver begin questioning whether keeping these memories contained in one person is truly beneficial for everyone.

In this story, Lois Lowry writes in a simple and honest style that allows us to Jonas’s world in the way he sees it despite being from a third-person point of view. As he learns and discovers more about the world outside the Community, we feel his building internal struggle and increasing burden to hide what he has learned from his friends and family. The Giver is a wonderful coming-of-age story that prompts readers of any age, but especially young people, to question the world around them and to appreciate the good and the bad as offering the gift of infinite possibilities.