The Giver | 
| Author: Lois Lowry
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Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3059 reviews
Sales Rank: 592
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.7
MPN: ING0440237688
ISBN: 0440237688
EAN: 9780440237686
ASIN: 0440237688
Publication Date: September 10, 2002
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Product Description
When Jonas turns 12, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver--who alone holds memories of pain and pleasure in life. Now there can be no turning back from the truth. Paperback.
Amazon.com
In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world and struggles against the weight of its hypocrisy. With echoes of Brave New World, in this 1994 Newbery Medal winner, Lowry examines the idea that people might freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable society. Gradually Jonas learns just how costly this ordered and pain-free society can be, and boldly decides he cannot pay the price.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3054 more reviews...
 The Giver- For students and teachers! May 14, 2008
The Giver
Author: Lois Lowry.
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Reprinted: September 10, 2002
Fry Readability: mid to late 9th grade.
Number of pages: 192
Genre: Utopian fiction
Synopsis:
This novel chronicles the workings of a utopian society. This community centers around duty, responsibility, correctness of speech, and courtesy to others. At the age of 11, each child must take his or her place as adults within the community. On the day of the Ceremony of 11, Jonas gets assigned the mysterious and highly respected position as The Receiver of memories. His training centers around receiving the unremembered memories of the world. Joy, pain, love, depression, and loss pass to Jonas through The Giver of memories. These new experiences give Jonas a new range of emotions and appreciation for life. At the same time, it begins to distance him from his family unit and isolates him from the rest of the community. He realizes the atrocities the community commits on a day to day basis to preserve sameness and to prevent the community from feeling. He begins to plan, with the help of The Giver, to release the memories to his community and allow them to look at life in all its rich colors, its devastating pain, and its overwhelming joy.
Negative aspects of book:
This book has a couple of disturbing moments centering around "being released" or the euthanization of those who cannot conform to sameness (the elderly, the sick, twins). My students found these parts difficult to read and even more difficult to understand. However, it did make for an interesting conversation about what a utopian society would be like and where conformity can lead a society. While I don't believe there are negative aspects of this book, these touchy areas should be approached with sensitivity and caution. At the same time, the issues that Lowry raises within real societies is unmistakably important for students to study and consider. We used some of the more disturbing areas in the book as a spring board for some incredible discussion. We even re-examined our own society in light of Lowry's critique.
My personal appraisal of book:
This book was interesting to me as a junior high student and even more interesting to me as a teacher of junior high students. It is a classic that holds readers and thinkers to a high standard. Parts of it may be hard to read for students with a lower reading level without teacher support (sentence structure and vocabulary might prove an obstacle to understanding). However, the story itself interested each student more and more the deeper we dug into the story. It is thought provoking while its characters are endearing, and its community is intriguing. It shows that without being taught, there is kindness, courage, love, and choices in a colorless, unvarying world.
A Captivating Read! "Give" it a chance! May 13, 2008
The Giver
Lowery, Lois
Published by Laurel Leaf (2002)
Reading Level: 6.5
192 Pages
Youth Science Fiction
I remember reading The Giver for the first time as an emerging adolescent. For the first time I can remember, a novel challenged me to do more than just imagine. This powerful novel (to the my delight) forced me to consider and evaluate the circumstances and situations the author describes. Lois Lowry weaves together a provocative narrative that challenges our assumptions about the desirability of a utopian world, and explores the dark underside that so often accompanies flawed human attempts at manufacturing perfection. The story is less about Jonas, a 12-year old boy who is designated to become the receiver of memories, than it is about the twisted modern utopia he inhabits.
The story is set in a world without extremes. There is no pain, no suffering, and no poverty, but at the same time, no joy, no meaning, and no love. The cost of ridding the world of its ills is sacrificing many of its greatest virtues. By introducing the reader into the sterile world Jonas is born into, and accompanying him as he breaks through personal and societal barriers, Lowry invites her audience to consider controversial issues about freedom of choice, the nature of authentic experiences, the conditions of righteous rebellion, the intrinsic value of human life, and the price of a painless existence.
Jonas's experience reminds us of the simple joys we tend to take for granted in our world, full of endless variation, possibility, challenge, and choice. In the (literally) black and white world that Jonas inhabits, experiencing everything from the fundamental concepts of color and hunger to simple pleasures and pains like sledding and sunburns leaves Jonas profoundly changed. The way Jonas grows and matures through learning about his environment reminds the reader of how important it is to seek out new knowledge to better understand our world and ourselves.
Despite the striking differences between the modern world and the society Jonas is born into, many of the decisions that Jonas grapples with upon discovering the true nature of his utopian existence are similar to those every teenager and adult must make as he or she matures to gain wisdom, and with it, responsibility. It is almost painful to watch Jonas, at a mere 12 years of age, carry the enormous burden of remembering (and experiencing) the imperfections and wonders of the past alone. Jonas's journey, beginning with his passage into adulthood with the Ceremony of Twelve, and culminating with his decision to flee the only world he has ever known (to what end, we will never know...), reveals the incredible range of emotions we all know well as the human experience.
#1 May 10, 2008
As soon as I picked up this book I was captivated by it. The people are all so ignorant ... the old saying ignorance is bliss Is best put here. Although there are some parts of the book that made me cry, don't ask me why but when I found out who got released I kind of knew it by the way he talked about her. Overall A great read and a captivating one at that.
 The Giver May 10, 2008
The Giver
Lowery, Lois
Published by Laurel Leaf (2002)
Reading Level: 6.5
192 Pages
Youth Science Fiction
In this captivating story, a young boy named Jonas struggles to come to terms with his own specialness, his community's secrets, and the full range of human experience. Jonas lives in a community where everything is carefully planned and carefully controlled. There is no suffering or discomfort, but likewise no joy and little individuality. Children are assigned to families, mates are chosen by a committee of elders, and the weather is always comfortable. The people's lives proceed in a course prescribed by the community's elders, marked by routine, ritual and procedure. With the passage of one such ritual, The Ceremony of Twelve, the youth of the community are assigned to a profession. As his friends begin preparing for their new adult roles in the community, Jonas embarks on an altogether different journey.
Jonas has always known himself to be a bit different from his peers, and at his Ceremony of Twelve, he is chosen as the Receiver of Memories. As such, he is charged with holding all of the human memories passed from previous generations, so that the others in the community might be shielded from them. And so- bit by bit- Jonas begins to receive these memories from the pervious Receiver, an old man now know as the Giver. With these memories comes a whole range of emotions, good and bad, and wisdom well beyond his years. Armed with these insights, and the access granted to him as the Receiver, Jonas begins to see his community in a whole new way.
This book is a wonderful read for young people or adults. It dramatically addresses the issues with which adolescents are already familiar: feeling deeply, leaving childhood behind, and questioning the rules of their upbringing. It challenges the mind to consider issues of conformity and rebellion, and the infinite pros and cons of the human condition. The reader must wrestle with the questions like "is the absence of unpleasantness really happiness?", "is getting rid of sadness and pain worth it if it means giving up things like love and creativity?", and "how far will people go to preserve harmony and avoid unpleasantness?". These questions challenge and extend young minds, but may be a bit complex for young readers. Additionally, the mood and subject matter of the book are quite dark at times, and may be upsetting to some. Overall, however, this is an intellectually and emotionally engaging book that I found hard to put down!
Review of The Giver May 10, 2008
The Giver -
1.Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co. (1993)
2.Author: Lois Lowry
3.Reading Level: Young Adults (Ages 11-15)
4.Number of Pages: 192
5.Genre: Science Fiction / Fantasy
Lois Lowry's The Giver is written from the point of view of Jonas, an 11-year-old boy who lives in a perfect yet artificial community. There is no pain, no poverty, no fear, no war and no hatred. This society has also eliminated choice.
Jonas has an unusual power of perception. Sometimes he perceives flashes of color, whereas for everyone else, there is no color. He also has instances where he sees objects change shapes. This foreshadows Jonas's assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve. Jonas' life changes the day he turns twelve. He is apprehensive about the upcoming Ceremony of Twelve, when he will be given his assignment as an adult member of society. The Committee of Elders tells Jonas that he has been chosen to be the Receiver. The Receiver is the sole keeper of the community's memory. Someone must keep the memories of pain, war, emotion, etc. so that the community can avoid mistakes that were made in the past. Jonas receives these memories from the current receiver, a wise old man who tells Jonas to call him Giver.
Soon Jonas learns The Giver will transmit all of the past memories of the world to him, and his life will be difficult and lonely. He was no longer able to participate in family and community activities, and was no longer able to spend time with his friends. Jonas soon realizes that the world he knew is a lie. He asks permission to view a releasing ceremony and witnesses his father murder a baby boy by injecting him with a drug. His father "discards" the young boy into a garbage, because the boy constantly cried, unlike the "normal" newborns. After Jonas receives good and bad memories, he is deeply troubled and changed. He is not forbidden to share any of his training experiences with the community.
Understanding for the first time that life is far better being aware of the memories of the past and being able to choose, the Giver helps Jonas develop an escape plan from the community. Jonas escapes and the book ends. Lowry wants the reader to create the ending to this thought-provoking chapter book.
There are some negative aspects of this book. The people in the community are not allowed to feel. They only have one point of view - what they are taught by the elders. Also, the releasing ceremony is criminal and disturbing.
In this book, young readers are asked to think about life without the ability to choose, where everyone is the same, where there is no religion. It is a provocative book that allows its readers to bring their own beliefs to find the symbolism. I recommend this well-written book be read in a school setting. After reading this book, readers can see what life could be like without diversity, and it makes readers appreciate the freedom we have to make our own choices.
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