The Giver by Lois Lowry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow, I think this was the fastest I read a book since Harry Potter series! I guess it’s because the book is not that thick. But that does not mean the book was not interesting. In fact, it was surprisingly good and surpassed my expectation of it.

The protagonist of “The Giver” is Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy, living in a world called Sameness, where everything was the same – all children celebrated their age at the same time, all family had a father, mother, son and daughter, everyone wore the same jacket, rode the same bicycle, ate the same food, had the same hair, pair of eyes, etc. Well, there were a few exceptions with the eyes, and one of them was Jonas, who had a pair of “pale eyes”. Once a child reached the age of 12, they would be assigned a role in which they would be trained in and eventually worked to contribute to the community. There was one role which was held by only one person and that was the Receiver of Memory, who held memories of the past – something that no one in the community had. And Jonas was selected (not assigned) as the new Receiver of Memory. The current Receiver of Memory, an old man, slowly transmitted the memories to Jonas. Day by day, he began to discover secrets that lie beneath the apparent-perfect world he lived in. The question is: What will he do with all these information?

“The Giver” was written by an author of children’s books and therefore the book was simple to grasp and pretty much straightforward. Each chapter was short but didn’t lack the suspense. Each time you kept turning the page to find out what happened and just couldn’t stop. That’s what happened to me – I just couldn’t stop reading it!

Honestly, I don’t know if the next book after this one would be a continuation or another story set in the same dystopian world (I have not read the synopsis yet). But if it’s this good, I would give the second book a go. Though it would bother me slightly that I would not know what happened after the end of this book but I could probably live with that and make up my own what-happens-next. Yes, the ending is kind of a cliffhanger so if you could live with that, then go ahead and read it.

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