|
|
Title | The Giver
| |
Author | Lois Lowry
| |
Cover Art | ---
| |
Publisher | Ember - 2006
| |
First Printing | 1993
|
|
|
|
Title | Gathering Blue
| |
Author | Lois Lowry
| |
Cover Art | ---
| |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin - 2000
| |
First Printing | 2000
|
|
|
|
Title | Messenger
| |
Author | Lois Lowry
| |
Cover Art | ---
| |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin - 2004
| |
First Printing | 2004
|
|
|
|
Title | Son
| |
Author | Lois Lowry
| |
Cover Art | ---
| |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin - 2012
| |
First Printing | 2012
|
|
|
|
Title | The Giver: The Graphic Novel
| |
Author | Lois Lowry
| |
Illustrator | P. Craig Russell
| |
Publisher | Clarion Books - 2019
| |
First Printing | Clarion Books - 2019
|
| |
|
Category | Middle Grade
| |
Warnings | ---
| |
Main Characters | Jonas, the Giver, Kira, Thomas, Matt, Jo, Water Claire
| |
Main Elements | Dystopia
| |
Website | www.loislowry.com
|
|
 The Giver
Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a seemingly ideal world. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind this fragile community.
Gathering Blue
In her strongest work to date, Lois Lowry once again creates a mysterious but plausible future world. It is a society ruled by savagery and deceit that shuns and discards the weak. Left orphaned and physically flawed, young Kira faces a frightening, uncertain future. Blessed with an almost magical talent that keeps her alive, she struggles with ever broadening responsibilities in her quest for truth, discovering things that will change her life forever.
As she did in The Giver, Lowry challenges readers to imagine what our world could become, and what will be considered valuable. Every reader will be taken by Kira's plight and will long ponder her haunting world and the hope for the future.
Messenger
Messenger is the masterful third novel in the Giver Quartet, which began with the dystopian bestseller The Giver, now a major motion picture.
Matty has lived in Village and flourished under the guidance of Seer, a blind man known for his special sight. Village once welcomed newcomers, but something sinister has seeped into Village and the people have voted to close it to outsiders. Matty has been invaluable as a messenger. Now he must risk everything to make one last journey through the treacherous forest with his only weapon, a power he unexpectedly discovers within himself
Son
"They called her Water Claire".
When the young girl washed up on the shore, no one knew she had been a Vessel. That she had carried a Product. That it had been carved from her belly. Stolen.
Claire had had a son. She was supposed to forget him, but that was impossible. When he was taken from their community, she knew she had to follow.
And so her journey began.
But here in this wind-battered village Claire is welcomed as one of their own. In the security of her new home, she is free and loved. She grows stronger.
As tempted as she is by the warmth of more human kindness than she has ever known, she cannot stay. Her son is out there; a young boy by now.
Claire will stop at nothing to find her child...even if it means trading her own life.
The Giver: The Graphic Novel
Life in the community where Jonas lives is idyllic. Designated Birthmothers produce newchildren, who are assigned to appropraite family units: one male, one female, to each. Citizens are assigned their partners and their jobs. No one thinks to ask questions. Everyone obeys. Everyone is the same. Everyone except Jonas.
In the graphic novel edition of The Giver, witness Jonas' Life Assignment as the Receiver of Memory, watch as he begins to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community, and follow the explosion of colour into his world like never before through P. Craig Russell's beautifully haunting art.
I don't know why I never wrote a review for The Giver, and now it has been some time since I read it. I do remember the major twist, the one thing that no one else could see but Jonas begins to get confusing glimpses of, something that could be kept secret and mysterious in the book, but what blatantly obvious in the movie because it was a visual thing. In the book, Jonas could "see something he couldn't explain", while in the movie we all saw it with him and immediately understood what it was, taking away something that was stunning in the book, something the reader really couldn't see coming. I won't say too much more about The Giver, it's been too long and I don't want to give anything away, but this was clearly a dystopian society, and the ending of the book was odd to say the least.
Now jump ahead a few years, I'm in the library as Covid-19 is on the verge of shutting down my city so I figure I should stock up on my full allotment of books. I was curious how The Giver could be turned into a series so grabbed the next two. Gathering Blue was an interesting tale of a young crippled girl whose mother passed away. The rest of the village was all for sending her to the Field to die, given her bad leg they felt she was just a burden on society. Instead, the Guardians bring her into their building for they are impressed with her needlework skills. There she finds Thomas, a young boy with equal skills in carving. As the story progresses, one begins to wonder more and more about the motivations of the Guardians and the reasons they seem to want to aquire young, conveniently orphaned, talented children. What happens in the woods where there are beasts...and yet no one seems to have ever seen one? And finally, how does it tie into The Giver universe? In The Giver it seemed a future dystopia society, Gathering Blue is more post-apocalyptic, where all technology has been lost and people live simpler lives. Maybe because I was already expecting "twists", that things will be more than they seem, I found this book more predictable even while I tried to unravel the mysteries.
Messenger is a clear sequel to Gathering Blue. The connection to the The Giver is clear with a single character and yet I still cannot explain how the worldbuilding all comes together, if anything while I would have called The Giver science fiction, Messenger can only be called fantasy, with people having "powers" and a Forest which becomes conciously malevolent. It was an interesting tale, but by the end of it I was even more confused as to how everything was supposed to come together. There were a LOT of unanswered questions like who was the trader, how did people trade their...souls?...for the things they want, how did that tie into what was happening in the Forest, and how does this all tie into the overall world, where we know there are places with advaned technologies and others where people do everything by hand. More questions than answers. Hopefully Son will tie everything together, but I won't be reading that any time soon as the library is closed and no idea when it will open again. Ah, the suspense!
July 2020
Jump ahead a few months of barely leaving the house and I finally had a reason to go for a walk somewhere that wasn't a grocery store, the libraries were open again! And since this book had sat on a shelf for four months, it seems safe enough to risk the trip.
While the middle two books were clearly related to each other, Son is clearly a sequel to The Giver. We are back in this dystopian society but this time we see the same time and place from the point of view of a girl chosen to be a birthmother (much as they wanted to take emotion and biology out of the picture, in the end it was the only way to keep their population going). And she isn't just any mother, she is Gabe's mother. We follow her adventures as she tries to track him down after Jonas leaves with him, and of course eventually she finds her way back to the village in Messenger and then some loose ends could be wrapped up there.
In the end, I was a bit disappointed. All the dystopia, and demonic beings (is it SF? is it fantasy? no rule says it has to be either but it's confusing when not done well)...they didn't have any reason other than the author wanted to make a point and needed her characters to exhibit some strong moral fortitude against some sort of villain. But the world as a whole made no sense at all. The Giver was self contained, but then in Son she had to expose more of the outside world to this sheltered community. How did that community come to be that way? Why were they so technologically advanced while Clare found herself later in a subsistence level fishing village healing people with herbs and barks? In Gathering Blue there is some hint of some older society that has since disappeared but that is never pursued either. All these bits and pieces that make no sense as a cohesive whole. The worldbuilding (and logic) got shoved aside for the sole purpose of making a point (one as blunt as a hammer over the head). The series had good moments, but I think there is a reason people know about The Giver but don't know about the other three books, they add little but more confusion. Perhaps if they were all standalones it would have been a more sensible choice, as they did not work at all together. Or, if wanted to make that work, the reader needed to be given more about how all these different "worlds" all come together in this village and how it all came to be the way it is. I believe the world of a story is as important as the story itself, otherwise it just becomes a lecture and not a story at all. It's hard to take the characters for real, if they do no live in a world that feels real. It's close, there are some really well done moments, but overall it falls apart.
May 2022
Plundering the library's graphic novel collection I found a copy of the Giver. Beautifully illustrated, you can revisit this uptopian/dystopian (depending on how you look at it) society in a new way. And yes, because it is visual, colour will matter, and that was done wonderfully.
|
