Book Review: The Giver by Lois Lowry – A Thought-Provoking Exploration of Society and Memory

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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What would a community give up to make sure nobody was ever hurt? In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s answer is memory, color, deep feeling and choice, and the people who live there consider it a fair trade. The novel came out in 1993, won the Newbery Medal the next year, and has spent three decades near the top of both the best-of lists and the most-challenged lists.

Spoiler note: the sections below discuss the plot and the ending.

The Author and the Making of the Book

Lois Lowry was born Lois Ann Hammersberg on March 20, 1937, in Honolulu. Her father was an army dentist, and she grew up on army posts. Her first book, A Summer to Die, was published in 1977, when she was forty. Number the Stars won her the Newbery Medal in 1990, and The Giver won a second one four years later (Wikipedia).

By her own account she wrote the book in 1992 (Shelf Awareness). The starting point was her father, who in old age lost much of his long-term memory and kept forgetting the death of her sister, long past. Lowry began to imagine a society whose people had been spared the memory of suffering, grief and pain (Wikipedia, Mental Floss). She has also said that the Giver owes something to a Maine painter she interviewed in 1979, Carl Gustaf Nelson, whose feeling for color she envied and who went blind late in life. She chose his photograph for the cover (Mental Floss, which relays Lowry’s own account).

Houghton Mifflin published the book in 1993. It went on to take the Regina Medal in 1994, and Lowry received the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2007 for it. Sales have passed 12 million copies worldwide. Letters from readers kept arriving, and Lowry eventually wrote three companion novels set in the same world: Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004) and Son (2012). A 25th anniversary edition in 2018 added an afterword and the text of her 1994 Newbery speech (Shelf Awareness).

What Happens in the Book

Jonas lives in a community that has done away with pain, fear, war, hatred and choice. Its people call the result Sameness. Rules reach down to small matters such as where bicycles are stored and what stuffed animals are allowed (SparkNotes). At the Ceremony of Twelve every child is given an adult role. Jonas is named Receiver of Memory, the single person who holds the community’s past.

His teacher is the Giver, who passes memories to him by laying hands on his bare back. The first is a sled ride. Others bring in color, warmth and a kind of pain nobody else in the community has felt (SparkNotes).

Then comes the video. Jonas watches his own father “release” a newborn and learns that the community’s gentle word means killing. The father is following a rule: of two twins, only the stronger is kept (SparkNotes, Wikipedia).

Jonas has been soothing an infant named Gabriel, who sleeps badly. When Gabriel is scheduled for release, Jonas takes him and leaves on his father’s bicycle. They reach a hill where a sled like the one in his first memory is waiting, and they ride down toward lights and music from a village at Christmas. By then Jonas is showing signs of hypothermia, and the book stops there.

Sameness and What It Costs

The novel’s argument works like a ledger. Without memory there is no pain, so the community gave up its history to get rid of suffering and kept one Receiver to carry what everyone else forgot. What it lost in exchange is the point. Pleasure can’t be fully valued without a memory of pain, and the people of Jonas’s community don’t grieve, because life doesn’t seem precious to them (SparkNotes).

Wooden sled at the crest of a snowy hill above a glowing village at dusk

“Memories need to be shared.”

(The Giver to Jonas, in Lowry’s novel; the line appears among the memory quotes on SparkNotes.)

That sentence is the counterweight to Sameness. A memory kept by one man alone, however accurate, does nothing for the people who forgot it.

The control is mostly gentle. The community runs on rules rather than laws and treats adults the way a strict parent treats children. Rituals do much of the work: the evening telling of feelings, dream-telling, the Ceremony of Loss and the rules for apologizing all smooth over discomfort, so residents never fully feel even the small emotions they have left. The Ceremony of Twelve is the first time the community openly celebrates the differences among children, and people politely look past Jonas’s unusual traits until those traits turn out to matter (SparkNotes).

Readers who arrive from Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451 will notice what is missing here. There is no Napoleon and no Captain Beatty. Nobody rules by terror, and the trade was made long before the story opens, so the residents have no way of knowing what they surrendered.

The Ending Lowry Left Open

“I intentionally left the ending ambiguous.”

(Lois Lowry, in a School Library Journal interview with Anita Silvey, June 1, 2007.)

In the same interview Lowry said she still sees optimism in those last pages, that she was surprised when readers decided Jonas had died, and that she wishes she had written more of the section after he leaves the community. In her 1994 Newbery speech she declined to name a correct reading and shared reader letters that compared Jonas to Jesus and called the novel a sacred text (National Catholic Reporter, June 8, 2024).

The text gives both camps something. The hypothermia and the unresolved last paragraph suggest a death, and the sled, the lights and the music suggest rescue. The question Lowry never answered, what becomes of the community Jonas leaves behind, stayed with her even after Son, and the anniversary afterword was written to address it (Shelf Awareness).

Where the Book Falls Short

Reviews at the time were admiring, though not uniformly. Karen Ray of The New York Times noted occasional logical lapses and still judged the book “sure to keep older children reading. And thinking” (Mental Floss). The author Debra Doyle objected on plausibility grounds, complaining that events are steered to make a point (Mental Floss). Natalie Babbitt, in The Washington Post, read the novel as a warning in narrative form (Wikipedia’s summary of its reception).

Muted-gray library with an old man's hands on a chair and one vivid object

Later readers split the same way. Kara Babcock gave it two stars out of five in 2010 on Kara.Reviews. She found the picture of utopia powerful and unsettling, but thought the ending weak: Jonas’s plan repeats the approach of the apprentice who failed before him, and the community’s future stays unclear. She also doubted that a society like this could run as smoothly as the book says. At Worlds Without End, Beth Besse went the other direction and gave it five stars, because no other book had shocked her as much, while granting that it isn’t the best written she had read.

Both camps are describing the same feature. The book is short and built on one idea, which is why it works as a first dystopia and why an adult can find the machinery thin.

Why Parents Challenge It

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded challenges to the book for decades. It ranked eleventh among the most challenged books of the 1990s (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), 23rd in the 2000s and 61st in the 2010s (Wikipedia). Most challenges fall under “unsuited for age group,” with parents finding the material too disturbing, and the book isn’t usually targeted for language or sexual content (CBLDF).

Some critics have read “release” as a statement about euthanasia, suicide or abortion. Lowry rejected those readings and has said the critics often hadn’t read the book closely (Mental Floss, which doesn’t name the critics). She told School Library Journal she was mystified by challenges from very conservative churches, because a story about a government that controls people’s lives can be read as supporting conservative ideals (SLJ). Lowry opposes censorship of any kind (Wikipedia).

The Film, the Opera and the Graphic Novel

Jeff Bridges spent years trying to get the book onto the screen. He wanted to make it in the 1990s, with a script written by 1998 and his father, Lloyd Bridges, in mind as the Giver, but Lloyd died that year. Warner Bros. bought the rights in 2007, and the film that finally appeared was made by The Weinstein Company and Walden Media (Wikipedia).

Directed by Phillip Noyce, it opened in the United States on August 15, 2014. Bridges played the Giver, Meryl Streep the Chief Elder and Brenton Thwaites Jonas, with Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes as his parents and Taylor Swift as Rosemary. It cost about $25 million and earned $67.0 million worldwide. As of October 2026 Rotten Tomatoes lists 34 percent positive from 167 critics, Metacritic gives it 47 out of 100, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B+ (Wikipedia).

“a planned, pokey quality that will likely disappoint the book’s legion of fans”

(Kenneth Turan, reviewing the film for NPR. He also notes that the film adds surveillance drones and hints of romance.)

The second theatrical trailer, as uploaded by the Rotten Tomatoes Trailers channel on YouTube:

The book has had other lives. Susan Kander’s opera, co-commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Minnesota Opera, was staged in Kansas City in January 2012 and in Minneapolis that April. Eric Coble’s one-hour stage adaptation premiered at Oregon Children’s Theatre in March 2006. A graphic novel adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell came out in spring 2019, and Lowry has said she welcomes it, noting that color appears gradually, as it does for Jonas (Wikipedia, Shelf Awareness).

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Jonas die at the end?
The book doesn’t say. Lowry has said she left the ending ambiguous on purpose and still sees optimism in it. The last pages show a boy with symptoms of hypothermia and a village full of light and music.

Quiet street of identical pale houses with bicycles lined up outside each

What does “release” mean?
The community presents it as a ceremonial, shameful departure and never calls it death. Jonas learns from the Giver that it means being killed, and he watches it done to a newborn.

Is there a sequel?
There are three companion novels, Gathering Blue, Messenger and Son, which together make a loosely connected quartet. Lowry has said that reader letters pushed her to keep writing in this world (Shelf Awareness).

Is The Giver banned?
It is frequently challenged, which is not the same as banned. Parents have mostly objected that it is too disturbing for the age group it is aimed at. This review didn’t verify the status of any particular school or district.

Is the movie faithful to the book?
Reviews were mixed. NPR’s Kenneth Turan found it slow and noted the added drones and romantic hints, and the film holds a 34 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes as of October 2026.

How long is it?
The HMH Books for Young Readers edition from 2014 runs 240 pages, according to its Open Library record. Page counts vary by edition.

Where to Read It

The Giver (affiliate link). This is the edition linked from the buy button at the top of the page, and its ISBN-13 is 9780544336261.

Further Reading

Kara Babcock’s 2010 review on Kara.Reviews is a useful counterweight to the book’s reputation. She grants that The Giver is “a powerful reminder of how much we like our sunshine” and still argues it is good utopian fiction rather than great.

Tom Deignan’s piece in the National Catholic Reporter, written thirty years after publication, ties Lowry’s 1994 speech to current arguments over book bans and borders.

Sources

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