This book is VERY original in it's plot, and it is interesting to see the point of view in Jonas's controlled world. I like how Lois Lowry decribes the memories that The Giver gave to him. She also well describes the way Jonas is feeling. It is a very thought-provoking book, which really makes you ponder. The ending sort of leaves you hanging though. I have read this book 3 times, and every time you read it, you understand more of this remarkable book. It just never gets dull. I read it first when I was in 4th grade,(I'm a good reader) although I would recommend it to kids 11 and up. 5 STARS!


Extreme Major Suckage in children's literature   August 23, 2003
 57 out of 127 found this review helpful

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I'm the most bookish member of my family, and the only professional writer (pharmacology, medicine, government regulatory horrors) in the house. As such, I've often been called upon to handle the kids' -- and now the grandkids' -- difficulties with school work. My eldest granddaughter had been tasked with a summer reading assignment centered upon Lois Lowry's novel *The Giver* (1993), and she brought it to me because she was directed to read it with an adult. Her mother and both her grandmothers decided that I'm the adult. Oh, well.

To skip forward a bit, as the granddaughter is now obliged to deal with the wad of photocopied work requirements associated with this book, I've been digging through the Internet to find background on this novel, and some sort of insight into the teacherly impulses so obviously behind the pre-packaged study assignments dumped on the poor kid in June. In the process, I've discovered (to no surprise whatsoever) that there's a massive presence for this horrible thing among the ex-Education majors.

Understand, please, that I'm a science fiction fan. I'm thoroughly steeped in the genre. I also get my living through research and analysis. Spotting logical inconsistencies, intellectual sloppiness, and lapses in reasoning is the habit of a lifetime. I also used to read a lot of children's and young adult literature when my children were of an age to plough through such stuff, and I found much of it well-enough written to be pretty admirable.

When I began reading *The Giver* with my granddaughter (who's a bit dyslexic, and needs plenty of help to translate text-on-page into thoughts-in-mind), I kept turning from the contents to the cover, unable to believe that this thing had actually won a Newberry Award. This book was supposed to be on a par with *Maniac Magee*? Or *A Wrinkle in Time*? Or even a second-place finisher like *My Side of the Mountain*? Then I checked out the Newberry Awards list, and took note of more than a decade of Major Suckage in kids' literature (to which, I confess, I've paid not a whole lot of attention in the years between my own kids' growing-up and the rise to reading of my grandchildren).

"Ah," I realized. "John Taylor Gatto's *Dumbing Us Down* - with a vengeance. Of course."

*The Giver* falls into a speculative fiction genre commonly known as "the dystopia novel," which includes Ayn Rand's *Anthem* (1938) as one of the earlier examples. To the limitedly literate, Orwell's *1984* is perhaps the best example of this sort of "if this goes on" procedural, drawing horrible future visions from what are supposed to be lucidly reasoned extrapolations of societal ghodawfulness either proposed or actually in train at the time of writing. There are many more examples, one of them being *An Enemy of the State* by fellow physician F. Paul Wilson, written during the galloping inflation of Jimmy Carter's idiotic presidency.

As a dystopia novel, *The Giver* is an example of Extreme Major Suckage. It is fundamentally dishonest as speculative fiction, and Ms. Lowry is wonderfully fortunate in that the majority of children today - the victims of "dumbed-down" government schools - are not customarily exposed to books like Alexander Key's *The Forgotten Door* or the juvenile novels written by Robert Heinlein during his contract with Scribners' in the '50s.

(At this point I recommend that the people praising *The Giver* read Heinlein's *Between Planets* [1951] or his *Citizen of the Galaxy* [1957]. Compare Don Harvey of the former book - or Thorby Baslim of the latter - to Jonas of *The Giver*, character developed against character, situation contrasted against situation, context versus context, and consider that not only were Heinlein's books written for kids of the same age as my 12-year-old granddaughter but they hit print about 40 years *before* Ms. Lowry published *The Giver*.)

The plenum - the "world" - of *The Giver* is logistically untenable. That's a fancy way of saying that it's too damned fragile to survive for any appreciable time as Lowry has described it. Societal systems of such cloying control, if they were liable to a breach such as that effected by Jonas in the story, would have been ripped to shreds long before the events of this novel.

This is an important defect, inasmuch as speculative fiction of both types - science fiction and fantasy - relies heavily upon sustaining the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Even with the factitious mental retardation inculcated by government schooling, I don't see much chance that a reasonably rational child of ten or twelve years' age could ever manage to get past the "Sameness" bilge (*Induced* absolute color blindness? Gimme a break!) much less the total suppression of human ingenuity and initiative needed to preserve the sociocultural stasis depicted in this novel.

To put this in context, consider that the average episode of *Spongebob Squarepants* provides a deeper insight into human nature than does *The Giver*. Besides that, the Square One lives in a fantasy plenum - Bikini Bottom and all the silliness therein - that's actually better thought-out and more tightly integrated than the community depicted in Ms. Lowry's novel.

I understand why the ex-Education majors (the public school teachers) like *The Giver*. After all, it's been "machined" to death with all sorts of off-the-shelf study points and similar pap to be regurgitated by the luckless student (which means that the teachers can stick it to their victims with about as much thought and effort as an oyster expends in getting his lunch), and it's not exactly an intellectual challenge. Education majors, after all, are without doubt the dumbest damned people graduating from college (see cumulative US military Stanford-Binet scores on officer candidates according to undergraduate major subject area; the three lowest-scoring categories every year are education, home economics, and physical education).

Beyond that, though, public school teachers are the most thoroughly "velvet fascist" folks in the country. Think of them as Mussolini's blackshirts with an ostensibly kinder, gentler face - and a better public relations apparatus. These clowns secretly *admire* the "Sameness" in Ms. Lowry's book, and love to drown the kiddies in noise about how wonderful Jonas' community would be if only the governing thugs weren't as much inclined to have people "released" as is the average Texas politician.

Yeah, right.

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