This book has been haunting me. I think I have been staring at this book since I was probably a young teen, as it was always crammed into some school shelf. In the past three decades, i also saw it come up in a lot of reading lists as some kind of essential book. I feel like I might be underselling it. This book feels ubiquitious. I think US schools put things down kids throats, as I seem to recall meeting a lot of people that all seemed to have read this as kids.
At some point I guess I had to. Just as I had with Hatchet and Call of the Wild, I read this mostly because it would tick a box on those reading lists. To a certain extent, this book had been spoken about enough for me to know pretty much exactly what I was getting into before I opened the book.
The word that comes to mind is ‘seminal,’ and here is one of those instances where the etymology really does fit perfectly. I think this too might be considered one of those patient 0’s for the current epidemic of sameness in certain amount of genre literature. Perhaps The Hunger Games was the typhoid Mary of it all, but The Giver was definitively (to use the crassest metaphor I can) the guy who fucked the money (or ate the bushmeat). In this short little book you can see where so many of the tropes of dystopian young adults literature have their genesis.
For what it’s worth, this wasn’t bad. The dystopian world is carved out very delicately in the prose. I was expecting lore dumps, but didn’t really get that except for some parts in the dialogue. I felt that the simplicity of the dystopia helped with the credibility, in a way that I don’t feel when I think of The Hunger Games. One would imagine that upon seeing the kind of extravaganza needed to maintain a fundamentally non-sensical systems of governance, the people would at some point just revolt!
For what it is, its fine. There is a picture somewhere of my niece eating nutella for the first time, and you can see her eyes fluttering with 5 year old bliss. Is it the best sweet she will ever have? Nope. But its starting her down a road. Idem with books like this. Did I value it? Meh. Would I have valued it more had I read it when it was published and it was age appropriate for me at the time?
Probably.
Failures in Polymathy 