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I just started the audiobook of "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, and I'm nearly done, it's a short and enthralling read. It's aimed at young adult readers, but it's really secretly hard Sci-Fi / speculative fiction in the grand style of old: it proposes a future setting and explores how people (in this case an 11-year-old boy) would react within that setting.

calzephyr77 I think it was you that liked YA and wanted to read more SF; this one is definitely worth the (short) read. The audiobook production tries to enhance things by adding ambience music; I recommend the print version instead.

Edit: I didn't realize that this book had been out forever, so it didn't occur to me that there might be spoilers in the comments. There are, though not horrible ones as of yet. Just don't read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled.

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Oooh, I read that one a long time ago! I do believe there are two books that follow, which caught me by surprise. I haven't sought them out yet.

It only showed up as an audiobook through my library recently, so I didn't realize it'd been out for a while.

Quite lot of people I know read The Giver in 8th or 9th grade for school, and apparently in school they were taught a certain interpretation of the ending (my 8th grade teacher "suggested" that I read it for a book report, but we didn't do it as a class--it was kind of a running gag in college to have people who'd studied it in school "ruin" the book for those of us who'd read it on our own). This interpretation is directly contradicted by the existence of sequels. That combined with the fact that The Giver was published when I (and most of my friends) were in elementary school, while the second book came out after we'd finished high school--so we didn't hear of it when it first came out, but rather several years later--and we were all pretty shocked there were sequels.

i read it on my own maybe six years ago, and i remember coming to the sequel-incompatible interpretation, and then poking around on wikipedia and being appropriately surprised that there were in fact sequels.

Now that I'm done reading it, I could finish your comment. :) Yeah, it does seem surprising to me that there are sequels, though they wouldn't necessarily have to be about the same character.

But the aspect of whether things are "done" isn't what I'm baffled by, I want to know whether he was a success or a failure.

I tried to be as vague as possible so that it wouldn't be spoilery, but I guess it's possible for anything to be a spoiler. Oh well.

Based on your comment and

q10's (six years ago he would have been about 10 years older than I was when I read it) I think it might be that there's an interpretation of the ending that adults tend to come up with, and one that kids tend to come up with, and the author meant the latter (it is a kids' book after all). I can't even imagine coming up with the pessimistic interpretation when I was not-quite-13.

As an adult reader, I suspect that the "optimistic" interpretation of the ending would not have even occurred to me had I not known that there were sequels. The coincidental appearance of the same object that had been in the first memory was just too much, and to me said it could not be real.

What I found intriguing in the ending was whether the main character was actually another failure just like his predecessor, and his mentor was too kind to tell him so but instead led him on this wild goose chase.

I guess there's another interpretation of the ending, that the mentor's powers were even stronger than we thought, and that he somehow bent reality to place that object atop the hill, or that the "memory" had been contemporary rather than from someone "back and back".

Same here! I didn't know until I got online that there were sequels. I didn't have to read it for class, so I should really head to the library this weekend and see if I can find them :-)

I read that book a couple years ago, I really did enjoy it.

sorry to repeat if you saw when i blogged this at the time, but, although i generally thought that book was pretty good, i was really bothered by the poorly thought-out population dynamics. they say that each designated child-bearing woman bears exactly three children, and that the designated child-bearers are excluded from high-status jobs, and i think it's at least implied that the sex ratio of the population is 1:1. but these numbers would require that, in order to maintain a stable population, about 2/3 of the women in the society would need to be designated child-bearers. only we don't see a society with those gender dynamics - it's strongly implied that most little girls are looking forward to the prospects of other jobs. it's not relevant the main concerns of the book, but the way it apparently wasn't thought out still bothers me.

Yeah, I thought that too at first, but then decided I didn't want to figure out the details. I also decided not to dwell upon things like who were the birth fathers, and that they were selectively breeding for stupidity (though now that I'm 3/4 of the way through the book, that does sound about right).

I never thought of The Giver as sci-fi before. The Giver's abilities always struck me as more magic-based than psychic sci-fi-ish. *shrug*

It's a good book, though. I've also read Gathering Blue and it didn't leave as lasting an impression; what are the other sequels?

I would agree that the Giver's powers do seem more fantasy-esque, but the control of the weather is IMO more SF-esque, and the overall story trope is a dystopia.

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