The Giver

The Giver is the first book in the in "The Giver Quartet" written by Lois Lowry.

I think The Giver was a good book who is worth your attention. However, there are some glitches about the book I'd like to bring up...

First, the idea behind the government who watches over everyone and control everything to make the people safe from their own destructive former selves, is very unoriginal and frankly, it got kind of old, I mean this world is in so many books these days (Like the Divergent Trilogy). But, even though her base was unoriginal the world she made was great and very interesting and very much worth reading.

Also, the book was really short, only 180 pages. I usually don't even give a chance to a book that short. I believe that a YA fantasy book that is under 300 pages cannot be very good. Simply because that in those pages the author cannot create a world, characters and plot rich enough for the book to be great. Fortunately, there are exceptions. I was still right about my theory, the characters in the book weren't rich, I didn't deeply care about Jonas. But in this book that fact actually worked to the book's advantage it got the author's intent about this world and that community. At first, I didn’t care about Jonas, he was just another "robot" like the rest of the people, but then he became the receiver of memory and start learning about the past, about the "old" way the people used to live (our way of course) and slowly he starts to be an actual human. The problem is that by the time you start to care about him, the book already ends.

~*~Spoiler alert~*~

And that brings me to my next and final problem- the end.

The end concludes in Jonas running away with baby Gabe before they kill him, and him crossing "the border of memory" which means that all he knows about the old life will be released to everyone. But at the very end of the book Jonas and Gabe run out of food and suffer from hypothermia and the book ends with Jonas passing out. I don’t know why but I found that reading about the months those two were on the run, and their suffering and struggle to survive, was annoying. Lois could have saved the suffering the beginning of the second book in the series, she didn't have to finish the book like that. It

started with him being a robot and ended with him suffering and dying. Not the best way to finish the book but I respect the author's decision.

Anyway, read the book… even if you didn't like it it's only 180 pages so it wouldn't take much of your time.