Rating: 
Summary: Definitely worth reading!
Review: I read this book along with my 8 year old son. After spending the summer reading the 5th Harry Potter book, this little 180 page book gave us something more meaningful to reflect upon --i.e. how memories affect our lives. My son cried in the end, but overall, he loved it. He wanted the book to continue or to have a sequel. We also loved the author's Number the Stars.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly gripping read and beautifully written
Review: Jonas lives in a community that appears, on first acquaintance, to be perfect. It's a world without crime, and with no unemployment--and therefore no poverty--nobody has to suffer hunger pangs, never mind the torment of starvation and homelessness. All members of a family unit share the experiences and "feelings" of their day each evening and nobody lies. Or so Jonas believes. Only when he learns that his lifetime job is to be the Receiver (taking on all the memories of both pain and joy that have been banished from his society, and being given permission to lie) does he realise the community's creators have banished even more good than evil from his society. Jonas and his tutor, the previous Receiver, to whom he gives the title the Giver, decide that the cost of their stable society is too high ...Jonas's community clearly doesn't cover the whole world in which it's set, and one doesn't even have to travel over water to reach "Elsewhere", of which there are hints relatively early in the book. Most members of the community clearly believe that this is where people who are "released" go. Young readers possibly might not guess the truth here but I'm sure adult readers will. For a book with such a complex set-up The Giver is amazingly short at less than 200 pages. If it had been a novel for adults I think it would have contained a lot more detail on how this utopian society was set up, because it does leave you asking questions about it. Lowry does, however, give enough detail for the purpose of her story and she handles it deftly, never getting in the way of the forward motion of the plot and therefore taking the risk of boring young readers. I was amazed to hear that The Giver was on the list of "most challenged" books for 2000, on the grounds of "being sexually explicit, having occult themes, violence". I didn't see anything in it that wasn't appropriate to its audience of young adults. It's a thoroughly gripping read and beautifully written.
Rating: 
Summary: Extreme Major Suckage in children's literature
Review: ...
I'm the most bookish member of my family, and the only professional writer (pharmacology, medicine, government regulatory horrors) in the house. As such, I've often been called upon to handle the kids' -- and now the grandkids' -- difficulties with school work. My eldest granddaughter had been tasked with a summer reading assignment centered upon Lois Lowry's novel *The Giver* (1993), and she brought it to me because she was directed to read it with an adult. Her mother and both her grandmothers decided that I'm the adult. Oh, well. To skip forward a bit, as the granddaughter is now obliged to deal with the wad of photocopied work requirements associated with this book, I've been digging through the Internet to find background on this novel, and some sort of insight into the teacherly impulses so obviously behind the pre-packaged study assignments dumped on the poor kid in June. In the process, I've discovered (to no surprise whatsoever) that there's a massive presence for this horrible thing among the ex-education majors. Understand, please, that I'm a science fiction fan. I'm thoroughly steeped in the genre. I also get my living through research and analysis, and spotting logical inconsistencies, intellectual sloppiness, and lapses in reasoning is the habit of a lifetime. I also used to read a lot of children's and young adult literature when my children were of an age to plough through such stuff, and I found much of it well-enough written to be pretty admirable. When I began reading *The Giver* with my granddaughter (who's a bit dyslexic, and needs plenty of help to translate text-on-page into thoughts-in-mind), I kept turning from the contents to the cover, unable to believe that this thing had actually won a Newberry Award. This book was supposed to be on a par with *Maniac Magee*? Or *A Wrinkle in Time*? Or even a second-place finisher like *My Side of the Mountain*? Then I checked out the Newberry Awards list, and took note of more than a decade of Major Suckage in kids' literature (to which, I confess, I've paid not a whole lot of attention in the years between my own kids' growing-up and the rise to reading of my grandchildren). "Ah," I realized. "John Taylor Gatto's *Dumbing Us Down* with a vengeance. Of course." *The Giver* falls into a speculative fiction genre commonly known as "the dystopia novel," which includes Ayn Rand's *Anthem* (1938) as one of the earlier examples. To the limitedly literate, Orwell's *1984* is perhaps the best example of this sort of "if this goes on" procedural, drawing horrible future visions from what are supposed to be lucidly reasoned extrapolations of societal ghodawfulness either proposed or actually in train at the time of writing. There are many more examples, one of them being *An Enemy of the State* by fellow physician F. Paul Wilson, written during the galloping inflation of Jimmy Carter's idiotic presidency. As a dystopia novel, *The Giver* is an example of Extreme Major Suckage. It is fundamentally dishonest as speculative fiction, and Ms. Lowry is wonderfully fortunate in that the majority of children today -- the victims of "dumbed-down" government schools -- are not customarily exposed to books like Alexander Key's *The Forgotten Door* or the juvenile novels written by Robert Heinlein during his contract with Scribners' in the '50s. (At this point I recommend that the people praising *The Giver* read Heinlein's *Between Planets* [1951] or his *Citizen of the Galaxy* [1957]. Compare Don Harvey of the former book -- or Thorby Baslim of the latter -- to Jonas of *The Giver*, character developed against character, situation contrasted against situation, context versus context, and consider that not only were Heinlein's books written for kids of the same age as my 12-year-old granddaughter but they hit print about 40 years *before* Ms. Lowry published *The Giver*.) The plenum -- the "world" -- of *The Giver* is logistically untenable. That's a fancy way of saying that it's too damned fragile to survive for any appreciable time as Lowry has described it. Societal systems of such cloying control, if they were liable to a breach such as that effected by Jonas in the story, would have been ripped to shreds long before the events of this novel. This is an important defect, inasmuch as speculative fiction of both types -- science fiction and fantasy -- relies heavily upon sustaining the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Even with the factitious mental retardation inculcated by government schooling, I don't see much chance that a reasonably rational child of ten or twelve years' age could ever manage to get past the "Sameness" bilge (*Induced* absolute color blindness? Gimme a break!) much less the total suppression of human ingenuity and initiative needed to preserve the sociocultural stasis depicted in this novel. To put this in context, consider that the average episode of *Spongebob Squarepants* provides a deeper insight into human nature than does *The Giver*. Besides that, the Square One lives in a fantasy plenum -- Bikini Bottom and all the silliness therein -- that's actually better thought-out and more tightly integrated than the community depicted in Ms. Lowry's novel. I understand why the ex-education majors (the public school teachers) like *The Giver*. After all, it's been "machined" to death with all sorts of off-the-shelf study points and similar pap to be regurgitated by the luckless student (which means that the teachers can stick it to their victims with about as much thought and effort as an oyster expends in getting his lunch), and it's not exactly an intellectual challenge. Education majors, after all, are without doubt the dumbest damned people graduating from college (see cumulative US military Stanford-Binet scores on officer candidates according to undergraduate major subject area; the three lowest-scoring categories every year are education, home economics, and physical education). Beyond that, though, public school teachers are the most thoroughly "velvet fascist" folks in the country. Think of them as Mussolini's blackshirts with an ostensibly kinder, gentler face -- and a better public relations apparatus. These clowns secretly *admire* the "Sameness" in Ms. Lowry's book, and love to drown the kiddies in noise about how wonderful Jonas' community would be if only the governing thugs weren't as much inclined to have people "released" as is the average Texas politician. Yeah, right. ...
Rating:
Summary: What a book!! Less YA More Adult!!
Review: This book had me going with the word..."Start". I had never given thought to this book and passed it off "For Kids", labelled and put it somewhere in the back of my bookshelf. Till, I wanted to read it and I am so glad I finally found the need to! The Giver is set in an era of Sameness - in short a world that has no colour, no memories of the past, all that it has is sameness and a sense of serenity till a boy of the community named Jonas turns twelve. The community has a rule that anyone who turns twelve is asigned his/her profession - and Jonas is the chosen one to "Receive Dreams and Memories of the past" by the "Giver". The Giver is an old man who has all memories of the world. The crux lies in what Jonas learns and what he must do to gain or rather attain his individualism. An Excellent Read!!
Rating:
Summary: A story for the ages
Review: A world that on the surface is a perfect utopia, but once Jonas got to the depths of this world in which he lived he saw the truth. Throughout his life, he learned that to be different was bad, but when chosen to be the reciever and hold all the memories he learns the truth of his world and that it was as far from perfect as you can get. In the search for a perfect world they truly found an imperfect world. Jonas soon runs from this world to find the real world. The book ended with an uncertain fate. A sequel must be written to show his fate and the fate of his world.
Rating: 
Summary: Day Reporting on The Giver
Review: Summary: Jonas lives in a community of Sameness, where everything is perfect and setup by meticulous rules. People can't choose their jobs, they're chosen for them. If the child bearers have twins one would have to be "released," because it is forbidden to have two of the same person in the community. At the Ceremony of Twelve in December Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver, who is in charge of holding the memories of life before the community. He works with The Giver, who transmits memories of snow, excruciating pain, love, emotions, and colors; all the things the community doesn't have anymore. With his new role comes new responsibility and new freedom. Everything is all good for Jonas until he finds out the secrets of the community. Will Jonas be able to handle the memories that unfold or will he just give up? Review: The beginning was boring but then the book started getting interesting and caught our attention. We found it interesting how there were no feelings, and how the kids weren't able to go through teenage changes. It made us wonder what it would be like not to have feelings. We were fascinated by how the community reproduced. We thought the ending could have been more detailed because we wanted to find out what happened with the community Jonas left behind and wether the community he went to was what he expected. We recommend this book to people of all ages and who are willing to think.
Rating:
Summary: Very meaningful- makes you think about our world
Review: This book is a wonderful story about a boy in a perfect- world community; at least he thinks it is, until he is chosen to be the "receiver of memory": the only one who knows the truth. He goes to an old man, the Giver, every day, who makes him see the horrible truth of his world.
Some people say that this book is disturbing and scary, and I will not dissagree with that. But it is not right for them to ban it from libraries just because it makes them uncomfortable thinking about it. The point is to think about it, and realize what we're doing wrong in our community.
Rating:
Summary: Insight to Communism
Review: Jonas in his perfect world (no poverty, no sickness, no crime, no color, no music, basically communism controls)...goes through some changes. Big changes, not ur ordinary puberty changes. He starts to see things and feel things others dont. I really dont want to spoil the book. REad it! I have read it about 4 times. Great great book!
Rating:
Summary: The Giver
Review: *****Although I read this book when I was only 12, I have now graduated from college, and it is still one of my all-time favorite books. I still think about The Giver and all of its wonderful characters. I would recommend this book to any young person (and even an adult) that is interested in experiencing a society that is so very different than one would expect. It opens one's eyes to different political and social views. What a wonderful book to read on a rainy weekend. *****
Rating:
Summary: phenomenal
Review: I read this book because it was required reading for my daughter entering sixth grade and I wanted to see what the school was giving her. I was very impressed. This book is really thought provoking and interesting. I couldn't put it down.
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