My Experience Reading The Giver by Lois Lowry

I was 13 years old when I first read The Giver by Lois Lowry, and the inspiration came about in such a way: I was sitting in my middle school history class, and some of my friends were talking about a book called The Giver. I had heard good things about it online, but never read it. I mentioned that, which sparked a wonderful chain reaction, in which several of my friends gasped and started shouting “you have to read it”, and my teacher ( who kept a small library in the back of her classroom and knew the exact location of the book on its shelves) ran to the bookcase, pulled out the book, and flung it onto my desk dramatically. And it was at that moment that I realized—if this many people like it, well I guess it can’t be awful. I went home, thinking to myself: “how good can this book possibly be? It’s probably not even that great.” What I didn’t know was how very, very wrong I was.

As soon as I picked up The Giver, I knew it would change my perspective immediately. The skill with which it has been crafted is superb, and the quality and content of the writing made it impossible to unlearn the life lessons and new points of view that this book taught me. The main character Jonas is deprived even the most fundamental human pleasures— such as privacy, colors, love, and sunshine by a society that wants all humans under its charge blissfully obsolete. This story makes you think long and hard about how much you underestimate things like love and color every single day. I would highly recommend this work to any lover of sci/fi, or just a good read that is guaranteed to move your heart into exactly the right place.