The Giver (Lois Lowry)

The Giver
The Giver quartet, Book 1
Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Jonas lives in a perfect community, with a perfect family unit of a mother, a father, and a younger sister, who offer support and help him process his daily emotions every evening. He attends school, follows the rules, is polite and courteous, and accepts his punishments for mistakes as a good citizen should. This December, he and his yearmates will enter their twelfth year and receive their job assignments, what they will do for the rest of their working days until it's time to enter the house of the olds and eventually be released to somewhere even better, somewhere none have ever returned from. But at the assembly, something extraordinary happens: instead of a regular job, the Elders Council has selected Jonas to become the new Receiver of Memories. It is the greatest of honors... and, he soon learns, the greatest of burdens. Because there is much more to this perfect community than Jonas ever imagined, and what he learns will change everything he thought he knew - and destroy every shred of happiness he thought he had ever felt.

REVIEW: This is a classic young adult dystopian tale, written before the glut of tales that made the genre a bit played-out for a while. Aiming for atmosphere and message over plausibility and using Jonas's blindered point of view to present the world, Lowry creates a seeming utopia in its community of well-behaved people, each knowing their place and constantly reminded of rules (and corrected for errors or transgressions, first with lashes from a rod and then to more serious corrections), but who have been stripped of vital elements of their humanity over the generations in the process. Jonas doesn't even notice the lack, and takes for granted the necessity of sharing dreams with his family (who are not his birth parents; birthing mothers are actually considered among the lowest of the community, and babies are raised in a central nursery for their first year before being assigned to couples) and whatever emotions he happened to feel every evening. When he confesses to strange new feelings, he's relieved that there's a simple daily pill to make them go away. Even the words the people speak are nitpicked and micromanaged and ultimately rendered close to meaningless with obsessive precision, stripped of all nuance and depth. Jonas doesn't even mind how his every move is monitored, his every word listened to, because that's just how the Community helps keep everyone safe and productive and (what he thinks of as) happy. Neither does he question the concept of "release", or why nobody who is "released" is ever seen in the Community again.
It is only when Jonas begins training to become the Receiver of Memories that he realizes that the way things are is not the way they have always been. From the moment the first collective memories of the lost past flow into him, Jonas begins to wake to the world as it truly is around him, seeing it truly for the first time; even the ability to perceive color has been stripped from the citizens, a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for how their lives have been deprived of meaning and beauty in the process of creating a "safe" and conflict-free existence, where no unpleasant sensation or idea is allowed to linger longer than it takes to pop a pill. Naturally, his new knowledge begins separating him from his friends - or the kids he thought were his friends - and family - or the people he considers his family. As he learns what happened to the last apprentice to the Giver, he despairs, even as he becomes more determined to do something to change things, leading to a drastic action that may save or doom everyone in general and Jonas in particular.
As mentioned, there are some distinct plausibility issues with the worldbuilding, especially toward the end. Just how memories are stripped and gathered (and later shared) by the Receiver of Memory is vague, as is how people have been literally blinded to color (without making them completely colorblind; Jonas's ability to perceive color proves there are still both rods and cones in human eyes, or at least some human eyes). Likewise, some elements of the ending really don't make a ton of sense if you think too hard about them. I also raised an eyebrow a bit at the notion that, in this world, light-eyed people might have some inherent advantage over the dark-eyed majority; anomalously, Jonas and the Giver (and the previous apprentice) have blue eyes, as does a struggling infant who becomes a plot point. They all seem to share special gifts that allow for potential enlightenment, while the rest are just mindless sheep incapable of being roused from their complacent stupor, things that may not even be truly human anymore.
Despite those flaws, the book still has a decent emotional weight to it, conveying Jonas's growing confusion and horror over just what the community has allowed itself to become, what it has willingly sacrificed, in pursuit of an ultimately hollow paradise, driven home by a darkly ambiguous ending.

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