Jonas lives in a society where everything is kept very much under control.  Families are made up of the same basic units: mother, father, sister, brother.  Everything is engineered: from the stages you grow through as a child,  the words you are allowed to use,  the job you are assigned,  who you are placed with in your family unit, even the weather is controlled.  The Sameness and predictability are created to form a sense of security.  No one has to worry about being hungry.  No one has to worry about being homeless. No one has to worry about being sick or in pain.  When Jonas is assigned the role of Receiver, he begins to "see beyond" and starts to realize the darkest secrets of his community.  He is faced with making the choice of staying in the place he has been "kept safe" or escaping to find what he only knows as Elsewhere. 

​

This is one of my favorite books to discuss with kids.  I have read this with fourth and fifth graders several times over the course of my teaching career.  I understand that Lois Lowry did not create the genre of dystopian fiction but what she did was to make it accessible to a younger age group. I love to be able to talk with students about what seems to be going on in Jonas' community and why a society might want to move towards such an engineered existence.  In order to get the full picture of what happens to Jonas and Gabe and the community/society they live in, I highly recommend reading the whole quartet of books which includes Gathering Blue (2000), a companion novel to The Giver, Messenger (2004),  which tells about the fate of Jonas and Gabe and takes place after both The Giver and Gathering Blue, and Son (2012), which is about Gabe's birthmother searching to find him.

 

​

Book Discussion Reflection: I loved that we didn't all like the book.  Not being in agreement about a book is one of the biggest opportunities for growth as a reader.  Part of our discussion centered around the fact that Jonas and the community he lives in would be hard for someone non-male and nonwhite to identify with.  I feel like this is part of Lois Lowry's point.  I don't think she wants us to identify with Jonas.  She creates this colorless world of "sameness" wanting the reader to see that it's our differences and the "messier" parts of life that make everything beautiful.  I am glad we got to discuss the ending and whether Jonas freezes to death or makes it to the warm, lighted windows of the house in the distance.  Having read it more than once, I have come to both conclusionss.  After reading the companion novels, I know what happens to Jonas and Gabriel in much greater detail.   This is another great point to discuss with kids when reading The Giver.  In the past, I have even had students write the next chapter and demonstrate what they think happened next for Jonas and Gabriel.  We also talked about how we might get a group of YA readers excited to read this book.  One idea is to read the first chapter aloud to kids.  I love doing this, as it can really spark interest in what happens next.  I also liked the idea presented by one of our group members to ask teens/kids/students what a perfect world or society would be like and then ask what are all the ways things can go wrong, even in a "perfect world".  The cover art for this book has always brought to mind Christianity (I think the picture of the Giver looks like Jesus Christ) so it wasn't surprising to me that we touched on the biblical character names.  Again, I feel like Lois Lowry was intentionally creating a very "white", colorless, homogenous society with even names chosen from one of the most widely recognized books in the world: the Bible.  It adds to the "safe" , engineered, predictable nature of the world she has designed. 

​