Imagine a world where you have no decisions to make. From the moment you’re born until your last breath, someone else decides for you. What you wear, what you eat, what your profession will be, who your life partner will be or whether or not you’re allowed to have one, or children, which aren’t biologically yours as all children are produced by the women whose job it is to create them. All emotions must be examined and discussed so they can be smoothed out of existence. The people’s lives have become so flat that they don’t even see colors anymore.
In this world, everyone has enough and being the same is the rule of the day. Everyone has the same hair cut, wears the same clothes. When you reach the age of twelve your occupation is chosen for you. Everyone is peaceful and contented; no one coveting anything that they don’t have. Strong emotions are gone.
Sound like Utopia?
Not so fast.
At the age of twelve, children are given their occupations and Jonas is to become the Receiver, the repository of all memories. While working with the Giver, the old man who is slowing turning the memories over to Jonas, he begins to see the reality of his world and it isn’t pretty.
Without giving spoilers, I can’t say much more, but this is a terrific story; one that makes you think.
I’m not sure why it’s been considered controversial or why some places tried to ban it.

I think I'm missing something. Everyone loves this book and I liked it too, but it wasn't amazing or anything.

The Giver felt like a very sparse story to me. First, there isn't much characterization, so I didn't form an emotional connection with any of the characters -- not even with Jonas or the Giver (two central characters). Asher and Fiona (particularly Fiona) are introduced such that you assume they will play greater roles in the book than they do. I don't feel like I knew Mom or Dad or Lily at all. While the lack of an emotional bond with these lesser characters may be due to the nature of their community, Jonas and the Giver should really be more sympathetic, in my opinion.

Second, the description of the community itself is sparse. There is so much more that could've been described about this "utopian" community. I feel like Jonas' selection, his revelation about Release, and his eventual choice could've been built up and framed better. I feel like I got the quick campfire version.

Finally, while I appreciate it's overall message about the importance of individual differences, human emotion, etc., I felt like the book was a bit heavy-handed with its moral. Jonas' initial support of his community and gradual change of heart seems intended to present both viewpoints, but doesn't succeed in my opinion. The book's agenda was clear to me from the beginning. It also doesn't present alternative possibilities (such as a world without Sameness but also without war, a world without Release but also without starvation, etc.) -- the choice is either here (with Sameness and no color) or Elsewhere (with pain and suffering).

When teaching the book, I also felt it was very important for students to understand how this heavy-handed moral (that most of us would agree with somewhat) demonstrates Lowry's (and our own) privilege. That is, the reason it's easy for us to say that Jonas' community is horrible is because of our own relatively privileged lives. If we lived in Darfur, were extremely impoverished, lived in a country where women were treated as property, etc., we may make a very different choice about Jonas' life.

Despite all of this, believe it or not, I did like The Giver. It's an enjoyable read. It had a great plot, the community was interesting, and the ending was fantastic and JUST a little ambiguous -- cool!

A lot of people don't really like this book, which I find fascinating.

I know most dystopias come with a strong sense of the author's views on political issues (which some people disliked about this,) but I really don't care about that. I prefer to focus on the actual story.

And this story was great, in my opinion.

I am not going to go into the synopsis because I went into this book blindly, and I think that was a good thing.

But this story brings attention to the simple things we get to enjoy daily that we take for granted and how important our ability to make choices really is.

Other types of readers who are more action-oriented might find this boring. But this more reflective, philosophical pace was right up my alley, and I found it practically impossible to put it down once I started.

I thought this was a good ending for the whole concept, so I'm curious about what the next books are about...

(3.5) Not really surprising but turns out this is more enjoyable when you actually understand English!

If there are no wrong answers, can we really say that something has any meaning?

It is very easy to start an interesting science fiction story. Simply begin with a mystery. Don't explain things to the reader and leave them in a state of wonder. In this way, everything will seem interesting, intriguing, and worth exploring. Tap into the reader’s powers of imagination and allow them to make your story interesting in ways you need not imagine, and perhaps cannot create. This is a good plan for starting a science fiction story. Lots of science fiction stories begin in this way. On television, almost all of them do – ‘X-Files’, ‘Lost’, ‘Battlestar Galactica’, ‘The 4400’, ‘The truth is out there.’ ‘They have a plan.’

‘The Giver’ starts in this way. In the first few pages as the setting unfolded, I was struck by the parallels to China after the cultural revolution – the bicycles, the uniform-like clothing, the regulated life, the shame based culture, and ‘the sameness’. I also thought of China, because I immediately grasped that this had to be a culture which was designed to gently crash its population. There were many clues that the world was heavily overpopulated and the primary goal of the culture so described was to crash the population without descending into society destroying anarchy - the highly regulated birthrate, which was insufficient to sustain the population. To sustain the population, more than 17 out of each 25 females would have to be assigned to be birth mothers, and this clearly wasn’t the case. The replacement rate for a society is about 2.3 live births per female (maybe 2.1 in a society that is safe and careful) – clearly they were implied to be below this ratio so clearly this was a society that was trying to shed population.

Equally clearly, this was a society that engaged in widespread euthanasia for the most trivial of causes, which hints at a culture which doesn’t value life because people are in such abundance that they can be readily disposed of. I suspected that ‘Release’ was euthanasia almost immediately from the context in which it was introduced, and this was almost immediately confirmed when it was revealed that infants were subject to ‘release’. Clearly, infants can't be meaningfully banished, so clearly release was euthanasia. So I was intrigued by the story. I wanted to see what happened to Jonas and his naive family who had so poised themselves on the edge of a great family wrecking tragedy in just the first few dozen pages of the story. I wanted to receive from the storyteller answers to the questions that the story was poising, if not some great profound message then at least some story that followed from what she began.

But it was not to be. The first clue that the whole construct was to eventually come crashing down was that Jonas clearly didn’t understand ‘release’ to mean ‘euthanasia’. Nor in fact did anyone seem to know what ‘release’ meant. This shocked me, because in the context of the setting it was virtually impossible that he and everyone else did not know. I could very easily imagine a stable society where human life was not prized – after all, societies that believe that human life is intrinsically valuable are historically far less common than ones that don’t. We know that the society is life affirming, both because we are told how pained and shocked they are by loss and by the fact that Jonas responds to scenes of death with pity and anger. What I could not believe in was a society which held the concept of ‘precision of language’ so tightly and so centrally that the protagonist could not imagine lying could in fact be founded on lies. That’s impossible. No society like that can long endure. Some technological explanation would be required to explain how the society managed to hide the truth from itself. If release took place in some conscious state of mind, then surely the dispensers of Justice, the Nurturers, the Caregivers, and the sanitation workers would all know the lie, and all suspect – as Jonas did – that they were being lied to as well. Surely all of these would suspect what their own future release would actually entail, and surely at least some of them would reject it. Surely some not inconsequential number of new children, reared to value precision of language and to affirm the value of life, would rebel at the audacity of the lie if nothing else. Even in a society that knew nothing of love, even if only the society had as much feeling as the members of the family displayed, and even if people only valued others as much as the Community was shown to value others, surely some level of attachment would exist between people. Soma or not, the seeds of pain, tragedy, conflict and rebellion are present if ever the truth is known to anyone.

Nothing about the story makes any sense. None of it bears any amount of scrutiny at all. The more seriously you consider it, the more stupid and illogical the whole thing becomes. We are given to believe that the society has no conception of warfare, to the point that it cannot recognize a child’s war game for what it is, and yet we are also given to believe that they train pilots in flying what is implied to be a fighter craft and that the community maintains anti-aircraft weapons on a state of high alert such that they could shoot down such a fighter craft on a moments notice. We are given to believe that all wild animals are unknown to the community, yet we are also given to believe that potential pest species like squirrels and birds are not in fact extinct. How do you possibly keep them out of the community if they exist in any numbers elsewhere? We are given to believe that technology exists sufficient to fill in the oceans and control the weather and replace the natural biosphere with something capable of sustaining humanity, but that technological innovation continues in primitive culture. We are given to believe that they are worried about overpopulation and starvation, and yet also that most of the world is empty and uninhabited or that this inherently xenophobic community lives in isolation if in fact it doesn’t span the whole of the Earth. We are given to believe that this is a fully industrial society, yet the community at most has a few thousands of people. Surely thousands of such communities must exist to maintain an aerospace industry, to say nothing of weather controllers. Why is no thought given to the hundreds of other Receivers of Memory which must exist in their own small circles of communities in the larger Community? Surely any plan which ignores the small communities place in the larger is foredoomed to failure? Surely the Receiver of Memory knows what a purge or a pogrom is?

How are we to believe that Jonas’s father, whose compassion for little Gabriel is so great that he risks breaking the rules for his sake, whose compassion for little Gabriel is so great that he risks face by going to the committee to plead for Gabriel’s life, whose compassion for little Gabriel is so great that he discomforts himself and his whole family for a year for the sake of the child, is the same man who so easily abandons that same child at a single setback when he has witnessed the child grow and prosper? Doesn’t it seem far easier to believe that this same man, who is openly scornful of the skills and nurturing ability of the night crew, would more readily blame the night crew for Gabriel’s discomfort? I can only conclude, just as I can only conclude about the illogical fact that no one knows what release is, that everything is plastic within the dictates of the plot. Jonas’s father feels and acts one way when the needs of the plot require it and feels and acts in different ways when the needs of the plot require something else. What I can’t believe is that this is any sort of whole and internally consistent character or setting. Every single thing when held up to the light falls apart. There is not one page which is even as substantial as tissue paper.

It is almost impossible to draw meaning from nonsense, so it is no wonder that people have wondered at the ending. What happens? The great virtue of the story as far as modern educators are probably concerned is that there are no wrong answers. What ever you wish to imagine is true is every bit as good of answer as any other. Perhaps he lives. Perhaps he finds a community which lives in the old ways, knowing choice – and war and conflict (which probably explains why the community needs anti-aircraft defenses). But more likely from the context he dies. Perhaps he is delusional. Perhaps he gets to the bottom and lies down in the deepening snow which the runners can no longer be pushed through and he dies. Perhaps he dies and goes to heaven, maybe even the heaven of the one whose birthday is celebrated by the implied Holiday. Perhaps it is even the case that he was sent to his death by the cynical Giver, who knew his death was necessary to release the memories he contained by to the community. Perhaps he didn’t just die, but was slaughtered as the sacrificial lamb – killed by a murderous lie from the one he trusted too well. For my entry in the meaningless answers contest, I propose that the whole thing was just a dream. This seems the easiest way to explain the contradictions. A dream doesn’t have to make sense. And the biggest clue that it is a dream is of course that Jonas sees the world in black and white, with only the occasional flashes of recognized color around important colorful things as is typical of that sort of black and white dream. Perhaps Jonas will wake up and engage in dream sharing with his family, and they will laugh at the silliness and then go to the ceremony of twelves. Or perhaps the whole community is only a dream, and Jonas will wake up and go downstairs and open his Christmas presents with his family.

Thoroughly impressed by "The Giver," a two-decade old gem in a genre that basically always leaves me wanting more. No, this is concise & has all the basic elements of a dystopian horror tale. The sketchy subjects of individuality and color (in that pleasant "Pleasantville" way) and community are handled incredibly well (yes, "Hunger Games" is a rip off of this & Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies")--the subject of infanticide just gives this classic YA the push requisite to make it epic & essential both.

Because we were on the topic of the Holocaust, we were given to read "Number the Stars" (also exemplary) so I never got to experience this. Perhaps I would've become a bigger fan of sci-fi (or YA novels) well into adulthood?

Wow! This book was amazing! I had been reccomended it by so many people and I'm really glad I finally picked it up. In this book we meet a young boy named Jonas who lives in a community where everything is the same, there is no choice for anything as the Committee of Elders chooses everything for there citizens. They choose there job, there spouse, there children, literally there whole life is chosen for them. There are only two people in this whole community that are different, and that is The Giver and Jonas.
My first thoughts on this book was that it was gonna be a bit of a to easy read because from what I've heard this is a middle grade novel, but I was wrong. This book was fast paced, it was easy but not to easy, and it can be a quick read. I had very strong feelings of shock through this book because this community Jonas is from is so unbelievably different from normal human life and I would NEVER want to live there. I said "what the hell" about 5 times in just the first chapter of this book and through out it my mouth dropped open and I questioned everything. Such a good book if you haven't read it do so its truly amazing and makes you very thankful for the life that we as humans are able to choose for ourselves, because not having choice is a sad thing.

Read this book in my college class, Children's Lit. Awesome book! A definite recommend for all readers.

There must be something wrong with my edition because there's no freaking way this book ends this way!I checked and my Weird Liz Edition is okay. Thanks, Sarah.

n  “If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!” n

Okay, I'll be honest with you. This is a classic and therefore reviewers out there will talk about how powerful this book is and how strongly they felt about it reading it back in high school. The thing is, I'm 47/Immortal years old and I'm reading it just because I really want to watch the movie.

And because of that, I don't want to be the one to say the book had an agenda. Otherwise, how can you explain the premise? Never heard of iCloud?

I don't want to be the one to say the world-building had flaws.

I don't want to be the one to say there was no plot until the very end.

I don't want to be the one to say the build up around the "twist" was unnecessary because the twist was pretty obvious. n  n

I don't want to be the one to say the book wouldn't gather up the loose ends for you, no matter how much you were asking for it.

I don't want to be the one to say I hate open endings.

So, I'll say Lowry's writing was compelling and perfectly executed in such a simplistic yet persuasive manner. And the ambiguous ending was not something you can walk away from. Part of me wanted to scream, the other wanted to call Lowry and ask her what the hell happened.

I think this was my third or fourth time reading this book and I still absolutely love this book.

My Reaction After Reading This:
n  n

2 stars

Whoa?

Why?

Really?

SO FIRST OFF I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THAT I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANTED TO LIKE THIS BOOK SINCE MANY HUMAN BEINGS READ AND LOVE THIS BOOK AND MANY HAVE CONSIDERED THIS AS ONE OF THEIR FAVORITE BOOKS OF ALL TIME AND BEFORE I POSTED MY RATING I BROWSE THE RATINGS OF OTHER GR MEMBERS SO THAT I KNOW THAT I'M NOT THE ONLY ABNORMAL HUMAN BEING WHO DOESN'T THINK THAT THIS BOOK IS GOOD OR GREAT OR WHATEVER!!!

(*coughs* sorry I forgot to turn off the CAPSLOCK, I'm not shouting or anything *coughs* just please don't judge me *coughs* if you like the book, I respect you for that, but I really can't force myself into believing I like this book _(>.<)V)

Okay I'll try to explain what I don't like about it:
1. The book is boring.
2. The book is weird.
3. I don't feel any emotions at all towards the character.
4. I don't really understand the book.
5. I don't really understand the ending.
6. I don't really understand why this Utopia world should have no colors, no feelings and no music so that the people would live *coughs* decently.
7. I don't really understand why the children at age whatever should be given ribbons, what's the purpose of that?
8. I don't really understand why the characters should tell about their dreams to their parents.
9. I don't understand why Johnas has to take medications because he was having Stirrings. So stirrings for those who haven't read the book is somewhat closer to wet dreams.
10. I don't understand why the memories of war, loss etc. would make someone want to end his/her life or give up on life. I know that life is imperfect but it seems that the characters have no backbone, like idk I don't buy the logic of that one.
11. In short I don't really understand this at all!

If you're wondering whether I've read this one because it's a school requirement, the answer is NO. I buy this book because I've seen it on the list of best YA book here on Goodreads so many times. And if these book is bombarded with symbolism then please explain this to me(since I don't have brains for symbolism PEOPLE!), especially the ending (What the Fudge is that?) and I might change my rating, I repeat might.

I admit I’m very guilty of daydreaming about a life of ignorance, about ignorance being a bliss and being wistful for my carefree, ignorant childhood. So, it is surprising to see all my musings in the book.
I do contradict myself that love and want are more powerful when loss is experienced. But, I couldn’t- can’t help but yearn for ignorance.
The book was an easy read. I was almost finished before I even realised it.
Funny how in the utopia, birthing wasn’t honoured.
And this book is generally read to/by 6th graders? I probably wouldn’t have felt Jonas’s fuss, if I read this in 6th grade.

And I think ignorance is bliss. I mean think of it like this, If you never know dishes like bull penis and bird saliva and how they taste, you would never even comprehend the dish and the taste (which I think is eww). You would live your happy life eating tasty food. But the converse is also true. You would never know some of the very tasty food but it doesn’t matter because, you wouldn’t know the existence of the tastier food, so you are just content with the eating the food you know.


Total time spent: 2h 56min