The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Jonas lives with his parents and younger sister in a black and white utopia of Sameness. It's a perfect place, according to the Community, where deep emotions and color are nonexistent, jobs are predetermined by Elders, and community means doing what you're told and liking it, because you were specially chosen for the role. In his twelfth year of life, Jonas is selected to be the future Receiver of Memory, the person chosen to store all the memories before the time of Sameness. When Jonas meets the Giver, from whom he will receive the memories, he realizes the gift of knowledge and what it holds. Color. Music. Love. Emotions. Power. Things his family and community have lived without, in order to create a sense of harmony and likeness.There's more to Jonas's world than Sameness and monotony. It's far more complex than Grey. Families are allowed only one boy and one girl. Children are born to designated Birthmothers. Pills suppress emotions, referred to as Stirrings. People who break rules, including unfit babies, can be Released, meaning euthanized and sent "Elsewhere."
But from the beginning Jonas is different. His eyes are light-colored, his curiosities unmatched by his peers. After he discovers knowledge from the memories, he has to make a choice: Stay with his family or leave his dysopic community forever.
Lois Lowry's utopic/dystopic novel, set in the future, weaves several themes into a Colorful blanket. But the book is consistently challenged. Let's be honest, Jonas's world is unrealistic, especially by today's baseline media blitz where kids consume content from iEverythings. Jonas's world is fake. But it's also believable because of Lowry's master storytelling and seamless prose. If you march in the banned book camp, ask yourself, what better place to explore such heavy topics with young people? A futuristic society of Sameness, one that subtly reminds us of The Hunger Games
, without the poison arrows and dog maulings.The form is simple: Throw a character in the future, make her world hell, and give her enough curiosity, knowledge, and skill to endure, escape, or destroy it. For young readers, the reading experience is safe. Jonas's world feels unreachable, unfathomable, but his experiences eerily connect with them in unforeseen ways.
The obstacles, fears, and choices a character faces can, and often do, directly connect with readers across generations. Books are rarely taught because of their settings or alternate communities. It just so happens that dystopic settings and rule-stricken communities force characters, especially adolescents, to make big, life-changing decisions.
Every year my overprivileged sixth graders beg for permission to read ahead. The book? The Outsiders. A violent, raucous, coming-of-age story about a kid who's lost, who has no identity, who doesn't belong. His friends drink, smoke, rumble, stab, and shoot, and they do all of this with little moral conscience, granted you could argue self-defense. My point? The Outsiders is set in the antithesis of my students' lives. East and West. Poor and Rich (though my students could be the rich ones). Socs and Greasers. But the story affects them. They relate to Ponyboy's sense of self, his self-conscious behavior in front of an unattainable girl, his search for a place in the world.
In The Giver, Lowry achieves the same reader connection through Jonas. Jonas searches for a place where he can use his newly obtained knowledge, where love, music, and color are welcomed and embraced. Jonas wants what all young people want in life. They want a place to be themselves. A place where they're embraced. A place that doesn't hurt and mix them up inside. A place where they belong.
Through stories and characters, many find that place. And it makes them feel full of Color.
. It's slower than 
and 
. I'd go as far as saying this: the first third is mostly backstory and catching readers up with the destruction in the first two books. But I won't go as far as saying that 
(because it's that good)