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.

Book Review: How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman is touted as the British version of Tina Fey's Bossypants, but it is far from the comedic masterpiece of Bossypants.  The difference is that while both Fey and Moran use their personal experiences to make a point about modern day feminism, the takeaway from Bossypants is, "That was a funny story, and I can't believe women are treated that way!"  Whereas the dialog after a How to Be a Woman diatribe is more likely, "I wish she had told more of the funny story instead of ranting about feminism for so long."  Not that I am against a feminist message.  What I am against is being hit over the head with a feminist message that the author is just going to rescind or revise a few pages later.

The book is a humorous read though.  Moran's stories show her quite unique upbringing in a poor British family, how she broke into music journalism, and other womanly experience such as having children.  There were many times where I could feel for the gawky young Caitlin as she tried to figure things out with very few resources.  The dialogs between her sister, who she seems to abhor in a violent way, but who she also seems to have a tiny softspot for, was the height of hilarity in the book.  It is certainly worth a read.  All of the stories were great, but the feminist messages between stories were a bit long-winded.

Book Review: Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey

Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey was a lyrical love story.  Zeke is a slightly odd London painter who is tricked into letting the very pregnant Verona spend the night at his clients' house.  They have an almost instant, yet tenuous, connection that is abruptly ended when Verona leaves after just two days.  The rest of the novel jumps back and forth from Zeke's and Verona's perspective.  Most of Verona's sections start prior in time to where the previous Zeke section began, giving the reader a jarring sense of catch-up.  Zeke is a bit strung along by Verona's harried plans and there are many missed connections, but the experience helps Zeke to grow as a person.

The fact that Zeke and Verona became so committed to each other after just one meeting is highly unrealistic, but I suppose romantic.  The characters are a bit quirky, which perhaps adds to the high level of commitment that develops at the drop of a hat.  What Livesey does best is character development.  She so discreetly shows the mind of a man living with Aspergers, although she never directly reveals this detail.  The narratives from his viewpoint are eye-opening as to what an adult in his situation might have to go through on a daily basis.  While it is just a classic romance with a quirky twist,  the prose is effortless and, therefore, a smooth and enjoyable read.  

Your Apocalypse Viewing Guide

I consider myself a slight aficionado (not an expert) of disaster movies.  From the overdone bravado, Independence Day, to the cheesy dialog, insert any made-for-tv disaster movie title here, nothing shows the ability of vastly different people to rise above natural human greed for the good of society like a disaster movie.  These cinema gems are really an anthem to socialism.

Therefore, in preparation for the impending end of the world, I offer this brief list of educational movies.  Some of these films are by no means what would be considered apocalyptic or post-apocalypitic cinema; however, they are all madly entertaining or informative for their own reasons.  While it may seem obvious to begin with Apocalypse Now, movies such as this one will only get you accustomed to the horror you may see in the post-apacalypic world, which is a good skill-set to have, but not completely useful in your early preparation for the apocalypse.  Instead, begin with WALL-E, the 2008 Disney feature about how humans destroyed the planet then went into space to get fat.  While a lazy obese human race does seem horrible, and at times horribly probable, the movie is light and will therefore give you a "toe in the water" entrance into your future doom.

Next, 2012 because it presents every possible natural disaster in the confines of 158 minutes and really shows you how the 1% will stick it to us all.  Similarly, The Day After Tomorrow is an epic natural disaster movie complete with terrible dialog but despite the sequence of events being rather compressed, the science seems quite probable.  These two movies won't really give you an idea of how to survive, unless you have billions of dollars to build some kind of crazy ark, but they will give you an idea of the signs of impending doom and how the unprepared will fall apart and most likely die in a fit of tears.  Most importantly, they will give you a taste of how to defy authority because most likely, see comment about the 1%, those in authority will not have your best interests at heart.

To be truly prepared, you can't only focus on typical catastrophic disasters be they natural or human encouraged; you must also look at those disasters that seem like nothing at all for as T.S. Eliot writes in The Hollow Men, "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  For this preparation, we must look to Contagion and I am Legend both great movies about disease caused apocalypse.  In case the apocalypse has a more biblical foundation, you should also watch Shaun of the Dead, a 2004 gem about how to deal with a zombie attack.

Once you have grasped the actual ending of society as we know it, you now must prepare for how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.  Forget about money and learn how to shoot a gun.  Start with The Book of Eli because while the violence and plot are a slight distraction from your goal of learning to survive, you will be able to pick up some good tidbits here and there.  The ultimate education will come from The Road.  While it may frustrate you to not know how the world ends in the movie, that is really secondary to what you will learn about topics such as avoiding cannibals, cooking can goods, and adapting shopping carts for long range travel.

And maybe the end is not near, but watching these movies will at least be entertaining and if the apocalypse does happen this year, consider yourself prepared!  In the meantime, stop wasting time.  Those famous attractions you have always wanted to see, they could be underwater next year!  That expensive fashionable item you have been eyeing, pretty soon we might all be wearing rags!  The extra piece of cheesecake you don't think you should have, you will wish you ate it if you are soon living off of canned beans!

How Can You Tell It's Time for a Road Trip?

In Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, he describes marriage as two separate pillars holding up a temple.

"And stand together yet not too near together:  For the pillars of the temple stand apart..."

It is important for two people to be independent, but they need to also be holding up the same building.  Andy being away for four months is not as bad as things can be by any means.  There are countless spouses alone for up to a year if not more because their other halves are deployed.  And some day Andy and I will most likely experience that.  Even though we have been lucky enough to see each other three times since he left in August, I feel so discombobulated lately.  I am a crooked temple.

That is when you know it is time for a road trip.  In this situation, there is no reason to not spend as much time as possible together because someday it might be impossible to spend time together.  I am seizing the day and road tripping to Maryland!