The Giver was my hands-down, all-time favorite book from the 4th grade up until I wrote 4 papers on it in 6 months. Thanks, grad school! Now that I have analyzed and criticized and studied it to death, it doesn’t hold the same exalted position on my personal Bookshelf of Life, but it is still one of my go-to recommendations, especially for adults who haven’t read kid lit since they were 9 and think YA is a dirty word. It’s a quick, tight read, engaging, and the issues at hand – personal freedom, human nature, eugenics, etc –  are sufficiently highbrow. I do believe it has earned its praise and position in the children’s lit canon.

Until grad school, I was very content to ignore the two companion/sequel novels to The Giver. But then they showed up on a syllabus, and grad school allows little room for righteous reading indignation. I read Gathering Blue and The Messenger with a certain level of detachment; the existence of these books wasn’t as pure as The Giver, they couldn’t possibly be held up to the same standard, The Giver was The Giver, but these were just books. And I think it worked – I was able to appreciate the two books for what they were – stories that were more like The Giver in theme than storyline, that took strange supernatural turns, that were at times pleasantly atmospheric and mythological.

But still. Just books.

I knew that Son would be different. It had been so long since The Giver and its sequels were published, it would be the final installment, and I knew it would be about a birth mother. Ms. Lowry was returning to the community where she began – Jonas’s community – and she would have to pull out some stops to both satisfy original readers as well as justify some of the wackier storylines in the two sequels.

And despite mixed professional reviews, I think Lowry did just that. The novel’s protagonist, Claire, is a very young birthmother whose birthing career is cut unexpectedly short when her first delivery is deemed unsatisfactory. Instead of returning to community life in the fish hatchery, though, Claire becomes obsessed with keeping tabs on her child – a child we quickly learn is baby Gabriel who plays such an important role in The Giver. Without giving too much detail, Claire eventually leaves the community and spends the rest of her life in the supernatural, barely-civilized, liminal world of Kira and Matty, trying desperately to be reunited with her lost son.

This is not a tour-de-force, not a book that will stand next to The Giver in my mind or in the canon. I probably won’t hand it to friends and family. However, I don’t think it’s Just-A-Book. Lowry manages to combine the realistic and the fantastic in a way that feels more fable or fairytale-like, rather than an awkward mash-up of world-building. Claire is an interesting case study in cultural conditioning vs. human instinct, of the way deprivation of knowledge can make a person, a people, vulnerable and desperate.

And of course, there is the delight in realizing that Claire’s story is being told in concurrence with Jonas’s story, allowing the reader a coveted second perspective of that fascinating community that Lowry sucked us all in with on that very first page of The Giver – the errant plane, the spinning bicycle wheels, and “NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED.”

Maybe that’s what I wanted from a Giver sequel all along – to be indulged.