The Giver
This is supposed to be aimed as a children’s book, but I who am not a child, found myself reeling and grappling with themes that seemed to be stripped out of a book for adults. This was a re-read for me. I remember the first time I’d read it. It was when I used to read books on my phone (I don’t anymore because my eyesight’s gotten quite terrible these days), and I’d binge-read it in three hours at a long night in my room. I remember that night being cold, because I hadn’t really mastered the art of AC control.
It was a short book, only about 500 ebook pages. Can be easily finished within three hours. The chapters are short themselves, and they’re only twenty-three of them! Good read for a short rainy day, if you tell me. Well, I never read it on a rainy day. You could, however.
This was a sci-fi read, and it’s been some time since I’ve last read something in sci-fi. I’ve been quite grieved by the death of the author who introduced me into the genre, Dan Simmons, via his two-volume masterpiece Hyperion. His death was on the news today, and it was just heart-breaking because I really got into reading because of him1.
The beginning of the novel displays a utopian future which I thought was quite nice until later when I’d read enough about its problems. It describes a future when humanity has perfected civilizational ‘sameness’ with small communities living their entire lives inside little bubbled towns following an extreme ritualistic and rules-based life. The plot centers on Jonas and his family unit (this is literally what they are called), and his increasingly frustrated conflicts with his community’s ideology and past decisions as he learns of the past from the titular Giver.
It’s a scary future when everything’s done on rules, and there isn’t really an individualistic persona to anything. Children have to go through yearly rituals as they get older and follow rules that their parents and those before them had to follow. I was really shocked when I found out what ‘release’ and ‘Elsewhere’ truly meant within the novel’s vocabulary and to what great lengths they’d undergone to remove so much of humanity’s well … humanity. There are no feelings anymore. Only memories. And it’s the Receiver’s job to hold onto those painful memories of a confused-but-still-better-past in which certain things such as genuine love, snow, grandparents, and decisions existed.
The life the novel’s characters go through is so different from our own, assuming you’re reading this at 2026 of the Gregorian calendar. Though in an aspect, if certain powers were to be played and certain comforts erased, we could live life with that ‘sameness’, but I argue that we wouldn’t be humans anymore. No, we wouldn’t. We would just be animals whose future and decisions are made by the Council of Elders (which is like the state in the novel). It’s a harrowing possibility, and I just hope that nobody in the distant nor near future would ever think about giving up their humanity to attain immortal comfort, because that’s what the people did in the novel’s story.
A good read, and if you have the time, I do recommend to read it. It’s just so short, but so meaningful and poignant with relevant themes ranging from politics to climate change to war to the want of sex and to the fragility of human male-female relationships.
name & author: The Giver (Lois Lowry)
rating: ★★★★★
line: A universal masterpiece in the veneer of a children’s novel that depicts a grim future humanity may one day pursue and enjoy in.
finished: on february 28th
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Big reader of the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/02/author-dan-simmons-death-hyperion-terror ↩