The Giver

Read this one during a four day stretch of cloud sitting right on the ridge, no visibility past maybe two hundred yards, which up here means mostly radio checks and reading. felt right for a book about a world with the weather smoothed out of it, no real seasons, everything sanded down to Sameness. I keep thinking the one thing nobody is managing up in this tower is the weather, it just happens, and watching it happen is most of the job.

Jonas gets the memories handed to him by the old man, the Giver, and starts seeing color and feeling things his community traded away generations back. the twist that release means euthanized, quietly, with a needle, landed harder than I expected from a book this short and this plainly written. Read it in one sitting, maybe three hours, then sat with it a while before my evening check in.

The ending is the thing everyone argues over, whether Jonas and the baby make it to the sled and the lights or whether that’s a dying man’s last hallucination. I land on wanting it to be real without being sure it is, which I think is the point of writing it that way.

It’s clearly, obviously, highly based on Plato’s Republic, the guardians, the controlled breeding, the elimination of the unfit, and once somebody points that out you can’t unsee it. The movie took its own liberties too: bumped the assignment age from twelve to eighteen, and Asher wasn’t a drone pilot in the book, he was assigned assistant director of recreation. changes the flavor some.

Four stars. Short enough to read twice in a season if a man wanted to, though once left the mark plenty.