When The Giver was suggested in Books and Beer Club last week, I remembered that I did like the book. I remembered some of the story but not all. And I remembered that my favorite book in the series was The Gatherer. But for the life of me, I couldn't tell you why.
Some of the book club members mentioned that the movie of The Giver which was released in 2014 is on Netflix. Rather than my normal preference for reading the book and then watching the movie, I figured since I'd already read the book (albeit 17 years ago), I could watch the movie before the reread.
More details of the novel came back to me as I watched the movie. I loved the movie. It seemed very loyal to what I remembered of the novel. The cinematography was wonderful.
The night I watched the movie, I downloaded The Giver from the library. I started rereading it the following evening.
The setting of The Giver is a time in the future, after some really bad things have happened in the world and people are living in planned communities where sameness is the goal. There's no need for real decision making as the community makes all the decisions for the whole. Clothing and food and dwellings are provided by the community. Family units consist of a father, a mother (who are put in a family unit based on temperaments by the community) and two children, a boy and a girl (did you expect anything else?) specifically selected for them. There is no love. Every relationship is planned out by the community. After the children are grown and assigned to their own dwellings, the parents go to the place where childless people live. As opposed to the place where older people go.
In the community, there's no love. There's no emotion. There's no color. At twelve years old, children are thanked for their childhood and are assigned jobs based on their aptitude. Again, there are no choices involved.
Oh, and naturally there are no birthdays. There's nothing individual at all in the community. Each December there's a ceremony where all the babies born in the prior year are assigned to their family unit. There's a prescribed change for children at every single age. At 9-years old the children receive a bicycle, the only form of transportation in the community.
The year that Jonas becomes a twelve, all the other twelves are assigned to jobs. Jonas wonders what is going on when he doesn't get an assignment. The reason for that is because Jonas is selected for the most honored job in the community. Jonas is going to be the Receiver of Memory. Apparently memories, good and bad, interfere with living the kind of life those in the community wish to live. One person holds all the memories of past time so that everyone else in the community is living in the here and now. The previous Receiver of Memory is responsible for the training of Jonas. As such, the previous Receiver becomes the Giver. Through the transfer of memories from Giver to Receiver, Jonas begins to question the dystopian community he lives in.
As much as I loved the movie, I loved the book that much more. My memory served me correctly and the movie was very true to the novel with just some small exceptions. Since I was rereading the book and I'd seen the movie, I was able to move a little bit beyond the main story and catch details I hadn't caught before. There's definitely more to this novel that meets the eye.
I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoy young adult fiction and to those who have always wondered what it would be like to live in a world where you don't have to make choices, everything is done for you, there's no war, no religion, and people generally get along.
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