Transport with me, if you will, to the seemingly distant year of 2014. The world is a bright place, full of light, full of hope, and free of the terrible film adaptation that was The Giver that took a terrifically terrifying story like Lois Lowry’s tale of a small community with an awful secret and turned into something as forgettable as Phillip Noyce’s film. Believe me, there was nothing Noyce about it. Luckily, the terrible turnout of the movie only made me appreciate the original print that much more.
Based around an eleven going-on-twelve year old named Jonas, The Giver is centered in a seemingly ideal town without war or pain where children are assigned jobs that pertain to their skills in a gathering known as the Ceremony of Twelve, which happens to be coming up for Jonas at the beginning of the book. After the Ceremony has completed, Jonas receives the prestigious position of the Receiver of Memory, where he apprentices someone who is referred to as the Giver who passes on memories of war, hunger, love, family, pain, and happiness. With these experiences, Jonas grows to resent his emotionless community and begins to unearth secrets and the truth about where he has lived his whole life.
In my opinion, the scariest dystopian tales are the ones that seem completely normal from the outside, only to later be revealed just how twisted they happen to be from within. Much like the seemingly quaint town in Hot Fuzz, for any Simon Pegg fans out there, for reference. Communities like this in novels or movies, cause you to question your existence within your own society. It’s a strange thing, but when a book’s ability to convey a twisted narrative covered by a layer of normality causes me to question whether or not the person who just delivered my pizza is a simple delivery person or a person to spy on me for the Overlord, I enjoy it. A story like this that uses a lack of emotion within a community, all stored within a twelve-year-old protagonist, is a unique idea made all the more impressive with it actually being a book filled to the brim with mood and emotion. With a main character being twelve, it should surprise nobody that this book is a young adult work of fiction, written to be read by pre-teens going through an emotional point in life that feel as though they don’t fit in with anybody. The book’s use of emotions to sympathize with someone is just why this age group enjoys it so much; not only is it a brilliant narrative, but it is also a book that kids of this age can empathize with when nobody else in the world has the ability to empathize with them.
Yes, it is a book written for a younger audience, but Lois Lowry’s dystopian tale is one of the first instances of this genre being presented in terms of reading levels and it still holds up for readers of a more mature audience, making it a timeless tale of isolation in a rather plentiful community. It is a unique quality for a tale of a twisted society to be one of the more relatable stories for many age groups, one that makes Lowry’s work that much more distinct and loveable.
The Blue Room 