![]() ![]() Its narration is lean and economical, and the characters’ speech is laser sharp. The book challenged young readers with this imaginative inversion, and it attunes them to the power of spare prose. The Giver’s other-world, by contrast, is stripped of things we take for granted: there are bicycles, but no need for bike locks (there is no crime) and you have no clue whether your bike is blue or red (everyone is color-blind). ![]() Many books invoke childhood fantasies to heighten the everyday into a magical other-world-people walk, but they also know how to fly there are rivers, but some flow with chocolate. This is troublesome for someone like me, who believes that The Giver stands as a nearly perfect and singular work. ![]() ![]() If Lowry’s previous books from the quartet allowed The Giver to continue as a hermetic reality, this newest book penetrates the first novel’s narrative, almost as revisionist history. (Those books were not so much sequels as additional stories from the dystopian future.) Not only does Son return to the same place-that ultimate disciplinary society-but it returns to the same events. As the only book in the series to return to the community where we met Jonas, The Giver’s protagonist, this new novel is different from the second and third installments in the series, Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004). Last month, Lowry published the fourth-and final-book in The Giver quartet, called Son. THE YEAR 2013 will mark the twentieth anniversary of Lois Lowry’s beloved dystopian novel, The Giver. ![]()
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