“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” – 4/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: memories, pain, ceremonies, love, snow, and the feeling of sunshine.

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.

The Giver is set in a future society which is at first presented as a utopia and gradually appears more and more dystopic, so could therefore be considered anti-utopian. The novel follows a boy named Jonas through the twelfth year of his life. Jonas’ society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to “Sameness”, a plan which has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of “Receiver of Memory,” the person who stores all the memories of the time before Sameness, in case they are ever needed to aid in decisions that others lack the experience to make. As Jonas receives the memories from his predecessor—the “Giver”—he discovers how shallow his community’s life has become.

I’m sure you have seen this book before (or maybe even seen the movie version) because it has been around for a while. Some even consider it a classic! I’ve seen this book cover plenty of times before, but only when I saw a snippet of the movie I became interested in reading it – and now I finally did.
I enjoyed the book for what it was: a very interesting dystopian story with a unique concept. In this book, society “burdens” only one person with the memories of… well, everything, good and bad. They live happily and orderly because they don’t understand the concept of pain and don’t know what was there before – the only person who does know is the Giver, and now he is responsible for passing the knowledge to twelve-year-old Jonas, our main character, who has received his life assignment as the Receiver of memories. As you can imagine, poor Jonas had no idea of how heavy the task would be, especially when he started to understand what was behind his beloved community. After he starts receiving the memories, he begins to understand what suffering, hunger, poverty, and war are. On the positive side, he also starts understanding the concepts of color, snow, sunshine, and feelings like love.
Although I liked the book for the most part – I wasn’t too keen on the last quarter of the book if I’m being honest. The “solution” was very unsatisfying for being so sudden and rushed, and the ending was a little too ambiguous for my taste. I understand the author’s choice and the purpose of the chosen ending – to make the reader fill in the blanks – but it felt like an “easy escape” to the complex story.
So I didn’t love the ending, but overall I believe this is an impactful dystopian book with a very interesting concept. It is also a fairly short book, so that’s always a plus! I have to admit I have no intention of continuing the series, especially after reading reviews of the second book – so I’ll end it here!