I can’t remember where I got this author reference. All I can say is that I keep trying to read adult fantasy, and keep going back to the kiddie stuff. This was fine, it was okay, but the prose was so self-consciously dense and it could have ended about 100 pages before it really did. I finished it, and then picked up another one of her novels that came in the same pile from the library. But I didn’t have the strength; I tossed it down 30 pages in.
I’ve been hearing what a great children’s writer Lois Lowry is for a long time, but somehow had confused her with Lois Duncan, a writer I loved when I was a kid. Her novels were creepy, thrumming with tales of possession and the channeling of dead spirits. My particular favorite was a novel about two twin sisters separated at birth where the evil twin astral projects into the good twin’s life. That led to countless nights trying to project my soul up at the ceiling. Alas, I usually just fell asleep.
In any case, I am now the wiser: Lois Lowry is NOT Lois Duncan. However, The Giver was just as creepy–it’s just less Stephen King and more Aldous Huxley. Jonas lives in a Utopian society in which everyone has a role, lives are strictly regimented, and everyone is happy. But at the age of 12, when people find out what they are going to be when they grow up, Jonas is elected the new keeper of memories. And when he starts his course of training–receiving these memories from the previous keeper–he starts to question his own existence and realizes that while his world has gotten rid of flaws, it has also gotten rid of love and meaning. If you have a kid, and he or she hasn’t already read this, run out and get it. This is children’s literature at its finest.
Merge means that you’re supposed to merge, not that I am supposed to slam on my brakes to let you in while you flip me off.
