The Giver

Twelve year old Jonas lives in a tightly controlled community that has organized itself around Sameness, a system that eliminated pain, conflict, and difference by also eliminating color, real choice, and strong memory of any kind. At the Ceremony of Twelve, where every child in the community is assigned a life role, Jonas is selected for the rarest job of all, Receiver of Memory, and begins private training with the current holder of the position, an old man Jonas comes to call the Giver. Through him Jonas starts receiving the community's suppressed memories directly into his own mind, snow, color, music, war, and eventually genuine physical pain, and the training makes him see, for the first time, how much his neighbors have given up for their painless, choiceless life.

The turning point arrives when Jonas learns what release, the community's word for what happens to infants who fail to thrive and to the elderly once their usefulness ends, actually means: not a peaceful send off elsewhere but a lethal injection, administered routinely by his own father as part of his job. Jonas responds by fleeing the community with Gabriel, an infant scheduled for release that his family has been fostering, taking with him the only sled he has ever seen only in memory. The novel's ending is deliberately unresolved: Jonas and Gabriel, weakening from cold and hunger, reach a snowy hill, hear music, and see a house lit for what might be Christmas, and Lowry leaves open whether they have found real safety, are hallucinating, or are dying, a genuinely ambiguous close that has generated debate for thirty years.

Lowry's prose stays spare and controlled even as the ideas underneath it get large, and the book moves quickly enough for a strong middle grade reader while leaving enough unresolved, especially that final page, to reward rereading and argument, which is exactly what generations of classrooms have used it for.