Citation: Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print.
Annotation: When Jonas is chosen for a unique role in his safe and structured community his training reveals a whole new realm of reality, which includes both new joys and new pains. Jonas is faced with a choice - does he placidly accept the colorless reality that was created for him or does he forge ahead into the dangerous world of freedom and choice?
Justification for Nomination:
Lois Lowry's The Giver is a dystopian science fiction novel written under the premise of a world that sought “sameness” by climate control, sexual suppression and various other forms of control. The devices that Lowry uses to construct this fictional world are foreign to the reader but comprehensible. Places like the“House of the Old” and events like the “Ceremony of Release” are fictional to readers but Lowry co-opts terminology from the reader's reality to form an entirely new world. The Giver presents a world that at present, is scientifically impossible, but may not always remain so. Lowry does not invest much time in the “how” of this fictitious world, but focuses mainly on the “why”. One of the greatest strengths of this story is how frighteningly possible its impossibilities seem. In an apparently fictional world that lacks color, pain, choice and variability, the reader recognizes truths of the human existence. The experiential realities presented in The Giver are that of power, choice, identity and justice.
These realities echo many of the real-life experiences of adolescent readers. Through Jonas, readers can face adulthood, questions rites of passage, doubt those in power and be motivated to make meaningful and cataclysmic choices. Lowry acknowledges her readers' powerful potential through the character of Jonas, whose power to radically change his community as well as himself appeals to and inspires adolescent readers.
Genre: Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Censored or Challenged
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