The Giver, by Lois Lowry

Nothing gets me quite like a good dystopian book.  I love them.  The Giver was, I’m sure, the first book that I read that was set in another version of the future, and I was in love with it.

The thing that Lois Lowry did perfectly was give us just enough information about Jonas’ world to make us able to see it, but not enough to spell out what was going on.  Like in Jaws, how they didn’t show the shark until about halfway through, you really are left guessing through the majority of this book, and I think that that is what leads to such appeal.  I remember, in middle school, this being the absolute “it” book to read.  Everyone was crazy about it.  I think it is because of the guesswork that the author makes the reader use, along with the character of Jonas.  It was impossible not to put yourself in his shoes and live through what he was going through.  Just an incredibly written children’s book.

Just a side not, when I saw Pleasantville (the movie with Spiderman before he was Spiderman) this is the first thing I thought of.  I kept thinking about how the kids that were transported into the black & white tv-world were opening everyone’s eyes in the same way that the giver opens Jonas’ eyes, even down to having the flowers change color and so on. I always relate these two things in my  mind now.

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