Book #116 of 2016:
The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1)
I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up to my recollection, as the story of a repressive utopia and the lone preserver of its forbidden memories is quite deservedly a classic. On this read-through I was particularly struck by how immediate and immersive Lois Lowry’s world-building is. The Giver is not that long of a book, but the society she creates within its pages is striking in its details, and the novel unfolds beautifully with the readers’ growing understanding of how it differs from our world and Jonas’s growing despair and horror over the hollowness at its core. I’ve never gone on to read any of this novel’s sequels before, but now I feel like I might have to.
★★★★★
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