Book Review: The Giver Quartet

A few weeks ago a jump for joy surprise came in the mail:  an autographed copy of the final installment in Lois Lowry's Giver series.  My mom is awesome!  The present inspired me to reread all of the books that form The Giver Quartet.

I first read The Giver in elementary school and have since taught it to middle schoolers several times.  I remember as a child wondering if a place like Jonas' community - everything in perfect order, everyone perfectly taken care of - really did exist.  Parts of this social idealism really appealed to my desire for an ordered life even as a child.  While the supreme order of the community is appealing - no conflict, no hunger, no sadness - the sterility and mundanity is the downside of that order.  The good things in life - freewill, beauty, love, friendship - are only good in relation to the downs of life.  In Jonas' community, there are no downs, just mundanity.   Of course, almost no one in the community notices, and as the Giver points out, freewill and feelings can lead to catastrophes and have in the past.   Jonas is a twelve-year old who through his assignment working with the Giver learns some disturbing truths about his community.  He must courageously attempt to change the community.

In the second book, Gathering Blue, Lowry introduces a very different community where people have freewill, yet poverty, selfishness, danger, and hunger prevail.  The main character is again a twelve-ish child.  Kira is in a very bad situation when she is selected to help the community in a very special way.  There is no direct connection to The Giver in this second installment, but there are many parallels between the stories.  By the third book, The Messenger, Lowry is beginning to tie the stories together with the return of Matty, a character from Gathering Blue, who is now the protagonist.  This story also gives hints as to what happened to Jonas after The Giver ended.  While the hints are indirect, they are exhilarating to a fan of The Giver.  Matty, again a twelve-ish child, lives in a community that takes the good from the other two communities - people have freewill but are also kind and generous.  As evil begins to take-hold of the village, Matty is sent to save it.

All three books parallel each other in the depiction of young heroes courageously fighting for better societies, but each book ends abruptly.  In Lowry's new novel, Son, the stories are brought to a nice conclusion.  She opens back in Jonas' community around the same time that The Giver began.  The plot of Son moves through and beyond the time of the other three novels and encompasses most of the settings of the other three; in this way, Son literally encompasses the other three stories. The main character, Claire, is a birthmother in the original community.  After giving birth to a boy, she is kept from the baby, as is the custom, and assigned to different work.  Due to an unusual protocol, she is not reminded to take the medication required for all adults, leaving her to feel real emotions, something foreign to the members of the community.   While she begins at roughly the same age as the other three protagonists, her story is of a much more mature nature.  It touches on a type of loss and loneliness that is deeper and more adult than the previous books.  Perhaps in the same way that the characters of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series grew up at the same rate the texts became more mature, Lowry has saved this intriguing viewpoint for a more mature audience.  Of course, this could just be my bias as an adult reader.  There are themes in the other three books that are perhaps nearly as mature and not viewed in the same way by children.  Perhaps, like when I read The Giver as a child, there are aspects of Son that are understood differently by children than by adults.  For this reason, I often like to go back to novels I loved as a child.

For someone who has not read The Giver since childhood, or someone that has never read it at all, The Giver Quartet is a worthy revisit or first visit.

Puget Sound's Rougher Museums

Museums don't always have to be frilly buildings with girly tchotchkes in the gift shop.  Recently, I had the opportunity to visit two of Puget Sound's rougher museums.  Both the brand new Lemay - America's Car Museum and the recently relocated Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) are industrial looking buildings filled with the kind of stuff that interests small boys.  Yes, neither were my choice; however, both were entertaining.

Lemay - America's Car Museum is also sometimes referred to as the giant metal slug.  The museum sits between downtown Tacoma and the Tacoma Dome.  When we first visited Tacoma in 2010, the building was under construction.  We had a lot of wild guesses as to what this long flat metal building next to the interstate was going to be.  It looks a little like an upside-down sardine can on a pedestal.  In reality, it is just a huge garage.  The museum, which opened in the summer of 2012, houses more than 300 cars, trucks, and motorcycles most of which are from the first half of the twentieth century.  Much to my delight, it was a romp through some of my favorite eras.  There was a wide array of the earliest automobiles, sleek and stylish cars from the roaring twenties, behemoths of the fifties, and in good taste, very few cars from the sixties, seventies, and eighties.  Stylish and cars just didn't go together in those decades.   From a 1906 Cadillac to the 1994 Flintmobile, built for the Flintstone's movie, it was a feast of our country's gluttony for rolling autonomy.

The Museum of History and Industry was exactly how it sounds - a little boring.  While they had many interactive exhibits, the topics - business, innovation, city planning - are not necessarily my interests.  The new location, they just moved to a former Naval Armory on South Lake Union at the end of 2012, is rather nice.  The entrance opens into a four story atrium.  Right away there is a giant wall of dioramas about Washington that can be lit up one at a time by the patrons.  They also have business building boards that look like air hockey tables and allow patrons to assemble tools for a business and see if that business would succeed.  From a room about Boeing to a periscope to earthquakes to film in Seattle to the World's Fair to Microsoft, the museum is a hodgepodge, which is perhaps why I didn't love it.  There seemed to be no topical organization or central focus for us to connect with as we roamed through the artifacts.  The absolute BEST thing was the musical medley about the Seattle fire complete with light up artifacts.  I haven't seen anything so amazingly hokey since the Salem Witch museum's rendition of the Salem Witch trials complete with lit up wax figurines in dioramas.  All kidding aside, this was their best exhibit because it logically moved from the fire to how Seattle rebuilt.  I also really liked the 3D map of the Puget Sound area that was set up to change from the natural area to the man-altered area.  Probably, I set myself up for disappointment because somewhere I got the idea that the museum would have a real train, which it didn't.  Although, for a museum full of topics I am not interested in, I was entertained for the better part of a day.