The Giver by Lois Lowry

First published in 1993 by Houghton Mifflin

The Aaron Rodgers book club has become a feature of Rodgers’ Tuesday appearances on the Pat McAfee show. McAfee is a former NFL punter who offers an opinionated, amusing, and often insightful take on football, the world of sports, and whatever crosses his mind during his daily broadcast. Rodgers is a legend, a future Hall of Fame quarterback who, at 37, continues to lead the Green Bay Packers to victory in game after game. How Rodgers started a book club on a sports show is a bit of a mystery, but Rodgers is a cerebral athlete who views life as a beautiful mystery.

I commend Rodgers for urging sports fans to read. I commend McAfee for giving Rogers the space to talk about the universe outside of football. Rodgers’ book club selections tend to be inspirational or self-help books that are meant to guide people as they learn how to live in the moment, to acquire their best life, and to succeed in their endeavors, just as Rogers has done. Of course, it helps that Rodgers can throw a football into a bucket from a distance of 70 yards, but still.

The Giver is one of the books Rogers recommended. McAfee is 34; he claimed that he was supposed to read The Giver in grade school. McAfee is a loquacious, funny guy, but he makes no secret of the fact that he’s not much of a reader. I was between marriages and well into my career when The Giver was published, so I wasn’t asked to read it in school. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing about it, notwithstanding that The Giver was a YA bestseller.

It seems that The Giver has been widely assigned in middle school since its publication. It is also widely challenged or banned for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, although I never understand the desire to ban books. Almost any book that asks readers to think about social justice is challenged or banned by people who fear social justice. Still, I don’t know what aspect of The Giver could possibly frighten or offend anyone, beyond authoritarians who view the controlling society depicted in the novel as ideal.

The Giver is a parable. It imagines a community that has divorced itself from the rest of the world. The community lives by a strict set of rules. The governing council assigns jobs and spouses. Married couples are given children to raise on the community’s behalf after they have been nurtured by specialists in infant childcare centers. At puberty, everyone takes a daily pill to suppress their sexual desire. Older people are segregated into facilities where they receive care until it is time for them to be released. People are given a strict set of rules to obey that focus largely on civility. They can’t go outside at night unless their job requires it. They can’t ask intrusive questions or make rude remarks. Three offenses will result in the offender’s release. There are no hills because they make productivity more difficult. There are no animals or colors because they distract from a productive life. Weather is controlled so every day is the same as every other day. That’s the point of the society. Sameness is the ultimate value. When everything is the same, when everything is controlled, there are no risks. People feel no pain, no jealousy. They have no sense of loss. Crime is nonexistent. The society seems utopian.

The story follows a boy named Jonas. As the story begins, he is about to become a Twelve. At the Twelve ceremony, he will be assigned his life work. His little sister is eager to reach the age at which she will be assigned a bicycle. Jonas’ father is a Nurturer who takes care of babies before they are assigned to a home. Jonas’ father is hoping that a baby who cries at night will become less burdensome so that it won’t be necessary for the community to release the baby. You can guess what “release” means, although Jonas has no clue.

At the Twelve ceremony, Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of memories. He replaces the old Receiver, who becomes the Giver of memories. As Jonas receives memories, he is able, for the first time, to see colors, to feel warmth, to experience love. But he also experiences cold and pain and terror and loss, all the things that the community shields from its members in the interest of pursuing a utopian society. Jonas and the Giver agree that it is wrong to deprive people of enriching experiences even if they are protected from disturbing experiences. They agree that something needs to be done. The choice they make leads to an ambiguous ending, but the ending really isn’t the point. The point is that they exercise the power to make a choice in a society that denies choice.

The story argues that people don’t really live if they don’t experience everything that comes with life. If eliminating pain means eliminating pleasure, if eliminating the perception of loss means eliminating the perception of love, if the only feeling is contentment, people exist but they don’t live. On McAfee’s show and elsewhere, Rodgers talks about learning by being open to experience and by overcoming adversity. He talks about gratitude and appreciation and openness. In the world of sports, winning games becomes more special when the winner remembers all the losses that were endured while rising to the top. The message of The Giver fits the Aaron Rodgers theme of living in the moment and experiencing life fully. Both sorrow and ecstasy have their place in the fullness of life.

While The Giver is clearly a Young Adult novel, I agree with Jen Doll, who talked to Kate Milford (a YA author who also hadn’t read the book) and wrote an article in the Atlantic about their experience of first reading it as an adult. Doll argues that the book is about “the ability to choose versus having things told to you, dictated, or prescribed. Choosing is harder, but in a free society, we have to be able to do it for ourselves, and of course, we value that.” Taking choices away from kids is what parents do (and with good reason), but notwithstanding the desire of helicopter moms to protect their kids from the real world, part of maturing is exercising the power to make choices, good and bad, and to experience consequences, painful and pleasurable, and to grow as a result of chosen experiences. Doll and Milford both thought the book is a gripping read for adults who haven’t encountered it. It’s certainly a vehicle for thought. And if Aaron Rodgers recommends it, how could I do otherwise?

RECOMMENDED

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Published by Margaret K. McElderry (a division of Simon & Schuster) on June 7, 2011

Blood Red Road is a young adult novel and, as an old adult, I’m not part of its target demographic.  I thought I might like it anyway; I still enjoy the Heinlein juveniles I was reading as a kid and I’m generally a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction.  Blood Red Road is apparently a post-apocalyptic story (we’re told that reading and writing have largely become lost skills) but the nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed.  Although the characters seem human enough, it’s not even clear to me that this story takes place on Earth; I can’t imagine any sort of apocalypse that would produce giant carnivorous Dune-style sandworms (recast as “hellwurms,” these have legs and claws).  Too much in this novel is left unexplained, perhaps because no credible explanation could be concocted (e.g., what kind of weapon is a “bolt shooter” and how does it work in the absence of a power source?).  The gaps in narrative logic are one of many reasons the novel just didn’t work for me.

Eighteen-year-old Saba has always blamed her nine-year-old sister Emmi for their mother’s death during childbirth.  When their father dies while trying to prevent five horsemen from stealing her twin brother Lugh, Saba suddenly finds herself in charge of Emmi’s welfare.  She twice tries to dump Emmi on the only responsible adults she can find so that she can rescue Lugh, but she can’t rid herself of Emmi that easily (after all, the conventions to which the novel adheres require Saba to learn to love her kid sister).  Saba undergoes a couple of ordeals that test her mettle as she tracks down her brother’s captors.  She also falls in love with the guy she keeps pretending to hate.

My most significant gripe about this novel is its utter predictability.  Saba’s adventures are predictable, the love story is predictable, and Saba learns predictable lessons like “nobody asks to be born into this world” and “never give up.”  The story is too shallow to generate interest, much less dramatic tension.  Although Saba lives in a violent world, the violence she experiences is so far from graphic that it’s difficult to take seriously.  That’s probably a plus for impressionable young adults but the muted tone robs the story of its potential power.

Another complaint:  there are elements in the story that border on fantasy, from a “heartstone” that grows warm when Saba is “near her heart’s desire” to a pet crow that might be the smartest character in the book.  So is this a realistic story of a post-apocalyptic future or a fantasy romance?  I think it tries to be both and doesn’t succeed very well at either one.

I give Moira Young credit for having her characters speak in a consistent voice, but I found the voice troubling.  It resembles the language spoken by the less educated characters in a TV western crossed with the language spoken by TV hillbillies.  (In fact, Young’s characters sound like they’re imitating the characters on Firefly -- a wonderfully funny show that exploits that style of speaking for comedic effect.)  Language would change after an apocalyptic event but it would evolve into something new; words like “britches” that have all but disappeared from our vocabulary would not make a sudden reappearance.

In short, I thought the novel was predictable, unoriginal and unconvincing.  On a positive note, the story moves along at a quick pace and Young’s writing style is lively.  For those reasons, young readers might enjoy it -- particularly those who haven’t been exposed to truly well-written examples of post-apocalyptic fiction and who might not realize that Blood Red Road suffers from comparison.  To be fair, the marketing materials claim the book is appropriate for readers who are 14 or older.  To a 14-year-old looking for a post-apocalyptic love story, I might recommend the novel; to other readers, not so much.  As an adult who reviews novels for other adults, I have to rate this one:

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor

Published by Feiwel & Friends on February 15, 2011

The prologue to The Girl Who Became a Beatle contains an apt warning: the novel is a fantasy that requires a willingness to suspend disbelief, to accept the possibility of magic in a fictional universe. If you only like stories that are reality-based, this isn't the novel for you.

Regina is the sixteen-year-old lead vocalist for a pop band called the Caverns. She's in love with Julian, the lead guitarist, but hasn't told him. She's worried that the band is about to break up. She misses her absent mother; she wants to run away. Then one night, after making a wish for fame, she wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed and the Caverns have soared to dizzying heights of popularity by recording Beatles songs (supposedly written by Regina). As she steps into this world, Regina discovers that fame has changed both her life (which now includes a Brad Pitt type boyfriend) and her personality (she's viewed as something of a diva). As she ponders her new life, she is forced to confront her feelings about her mother, Julian, and (most importantly) herself.

The Girl Who Became a Beatle is like comfort food: familiar, predictable, easy to devour, and maybe even a little nutritious. The novel purports to teach life lessons, all of them pretty obvious: Life is what you make it. True friends are better than adoring fans. Be careful what you wish for. Believe in yourself.

The novel is written in the first person, from Regina's perspective. Its use of punchy sentences and short chapters make it a quick read. Whether the novel will succeed with its young adult target audience is unclear to me. I think it depends upon whether readers accept the narrative voice as authentic; whether they believe it belongs to a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm not part of the target audience (being old enough to remember watching The Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show) and about the only teenage girls I see these days are at the mall during my infrequent shopping trips, but to my unschooled ear, the narrator's voice seemed to be that of an adult male pretending to be a sixteen-year-old girl. I can't say that made much of a difference to me after I settled into the story, but if teenagers and young adults don't accept the voice as genuine, they might be turned off by the novel. I'd be interested to learn the reactions of members of the target audience in that regard.

Speaking from the perspective of a mature (okay, old) male, I enjoyed the novel more than I thought I would. It will never be mistaken for great literature, but as much as I crave gourmet meals, I'm also a sucker for comfort food. The story delivers solid entertainment and the characters are easy to like.

RECOMMENDED