{"id":2493,"date":"2014-08-08T22:51:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-08T22:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=2493"},"modified":"2014-08-08T22:51:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-08T22:51:10","slug":"how-did-i-miss-the-giver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/08\/how-did-i-miss-the-giver\/","title":{"rendered":"How Did I Miss “The Giver?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The movie is coming. \u00a0I saw the trailer. \u00a0But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s\u00a0The Giver<\/span> was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s<\/a> The Keeper<\/a>!. \u00a0Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post<\/a>. \u00a0And The Giver? \u00a0<\/span>I hadn’t even read it.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I did. \u00a0I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Meda<\/a>l in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s! \u00a0It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.<\/p>\n

As a veteran of the Divergent <\/a>trilogy and The Hunger Games<\/a> (and, ok, the Twilight Series<\/a> but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear<\/a>–holocaust <\/a>novels and a ton of cyberfiction<\/a>, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods. \u00a0Even so, the intent of The Giver<\/span> is a little different. \u00a0 There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain. \u00a0It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Except, of course, it isn’t.<\/p>\n

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love. \u00a0Oh – and babies, too. \u00a0One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad. \u00a0 We know this will not stand. \u00a0And that’s the point.<\/p>\n

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch:\u00a0\u201cGiven the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms<\/a>\u00a0 Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists. \u00a0And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers. \u00a0As she told the New York Times: \u00a0 “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”<\/p>\n

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must,<\/em> join him. \u00a0Take a stand. \u00a0Change a mind. \u00a0Solve a problem. \u00a0Correct an injustice. \u00a0Fall in love. \u00a0Break our hearts or someone else’s. \u00a0Be alive.<\/p>\n

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The movie is coming. \u00a0I saw the trailer. \u00a0But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s\u00a0The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!. \u00a0Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post. \u00a0And … Continue reading How Did I Miss “The Giver?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,6,27,28,7],"tags":[2775,2774,2773,2765,2769,2766,2182,2768,2776,2767,2771,971,2772,2770],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-film","category-life","tag-divergent","tag-imagine","tag-john-lennon","tag-lois-lowry","tag-newbery-medal","tag-phyllis-reynolds-nayler","tag-science-fiction","tag-the-giver","tag-the-hunger-games","tag-the-keeper","tag-the-washington-post","tag-twilight","tag-william-faulkner","tag-young-adult-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-Ed","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2498,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/2498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}