THE GIVER: WHAT IF A PERFECT WORLD COST TOO MUCH?
Book Review | Lois Lowry
Imagine a world with no war.
No hunger.
No difficult choices.
No heartbreak.
It sounds almost perfect.
That is the world twelve-year-old Jonas lives in at the beginning of Lois Lowry’s The Giver.
Everything in his community has been carefully organised. Families are assigned. Careers are chosen for citizens. Rules control behaviour. Painful memories of the past have disappeared.
Nobody has to face chaos because almost everything has already been decided for them.
Then Jonas receives an unusual assignment.
He is selected to become the Receiver of Memory.
Through an older man known as the Giver, Jonas begins experiencing memories that the rest of his community no longer carries.
He discovers snow, music, colour, celebration and love.
But he also discovers suffering, loneliness, violence and grief.
Suddenly the world that once looked safe begins to look frightening for a different reason.
The most interesting question in The Giver is not whether pain is bad.
Of course it is.
The harder question is whether we can remove pain without also removing something important from being human.
Jonas’s community has eliminated many sources of suffering, but people have also lost genuine freedom.
They do not choose whom they love.
They do not choose their work.
They do not understand history.
They cannot compare the world they have with any other possibility because memories of different ways of living have been taken away.
That made me think about choice differently.
Choice can create mistakes.
People make terrible decisions.
But if someone else makes every important decision for us, are we truly living our own lives?
Another reason The Giver is memorable is that it does not divide the world neatly into heroes and villains.
The community was designed because people wanted safety and stability.
That is what makes it unsettling.
Bad systems do not always begin with obviously bad intentions.
Sometimes they begin when people try to solve a real problem but sacrifice too much in return.
Jonas gradually understands that protecting people from every painful experience has also prevented them from experiencing life completely.
The book therefore makes freedom feel less comfortable than we often imagine.
Freedom includes uncertainty.
Responsibility.
Wrong choices.
Consequences.
Yet it also makes love, discovery and individuality possible.
So, is The Giver worth the hype?
Definitely.
It is a short novel with an enormous question at its centre:
If someone promised you a life without pain, how much freedom would you be willing to give away to receive it?
That question alone makes the book difficult to forget.
