Son, the fourth book in The Giver quartet

I'm still waiting for two books I requested online from the library to come in. After falling in love with The Giver (click on the title to read more), while reading it the second time, I decided to read the fourth book in Lois Lowry's The Giver series. The only book in the series I hadn't yet read. (I'm still on the fence about whether I'd like to reread the middle two books in the series.)

In this review, I don't want to give any spoilers to either Son or to The Giver so my review will most be fairly brief.

Son starts off at basically the same time, in the same place, as The Giver. The book starts in the same community. Many of the characters are the same. The point of view of this story is totally different. This story centers on a character that wasn't even in the first book in the series.

We get to learn a little bit more about the community and the workings of the community. We see Jonas and his nurturer father from the opposite perspective.

The time period covered in The Giver is the first third of Son. After that, the story follows the newly introduced character, Claire. There's a final section in Son that reintroduces characters from both Gathering Blue and Messenger. It also answers the question left at the end of The Giver. The question that caused much speculation and debate after The Giver was published. I got the feeling that everything was going to get wrapped up in a satisfying way. The beginning of the end was satisfying. But the very end, not so much so. That's why Son got a 4-star rating on Goodreads and The Giver got the 5-star.

I've seen the genre of The Giver listed as science fiction, social and family issues and dystopian. I can't quite pin down a genre for Son but to me, it was pure fantasy. It makes me rethink the genre of The Giver.

While The Giver was clearly written for middle-schoolers, the content of Son seems much more mature. While the first book in the series is appropriate for solid fifth grade readers and would most probably appeal to students in sixth, seventh or eighth grade, the fourth book in the series, in my opinion, is intended for a more mature audience. I wouldn't want my sixth grader reading this book. At many points in the novel, it read like adult fiction. Or maybe young adult fiction. But no way is this a middle grades reader.

This book was twice as long as The Giver but I devoured it in about 24 hours. And no, I didn't sit inside the house reading all day - or stay up all night to get this book completed. It just flowed so well that made reading it quickly fairly easy.

If one of my books doesn't come in from the library tonight, I might be downloading Gathering Blue. I'll keep you posted.