I was about to walk up and start haranguing the poor woman when her publicist stepped up and offered to send me review copies of the rest of the series.Įncouraged that there really was more to the story, I eagerly agreed. Then, a few months after listening to The Giver, I happened upon Lowry at a book event, sitting alone signing autographs. But it was hard not to feel a little cheated with the book's open-ended conclusion. In a way, The Giver is more allegory than novel, so you could say that it doesn't need to follow the conventional rules of fiction. However, just as we got caught up in Jonas' story, the book stopped. At age 12, Jonas is singled out from his peers and chosen for a special job, to take over from the community's elderly Giver, a mysterious position that he cannot discuss even with his family. As we get into the book we find out why the author made these choices – but to the new reader they are almost offputting enough to make you put the book back down.Īmazingly, despite all this, we found our way into the story. The pace is excruciatingly slow, sentences are simplistic, and the characters are two-dimensional. Even vocabulary is tightly controlled, so that Jonas and the others don't have enough words to describe the things they see and feel. In keeping with Jonas' world, Lowry's language is stylistically spare.
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