by Lujin Malkawi

Hello everyone. Today I am going to share with you something that my daughter has written few months ago, after she finished reading this book “The Giver”. I thought her writing is really insightful, and deep for a twelve year old. There is also a movie made after the book.

Here is what she wrote:

“””I have just finished a book. It was assigned in my English class. I am 7^thgrade.  The book is called “the Giver”, by Lois Lowry. I finished it fast! I stayed up at night and read it, maybe not having to wake up for school in the morning is a good thing.  At the beginning it seemed so much like the Divergent, a fictional story in which roles were assigned to each child and person. But the more I read, the more I realized that things that happened in the Giver are things that happen in our world. 

Let me give you a brief summary of the book.

The Giver’s world was made to be perfect. Everybody was the same, dressed the same, eating the same food, behaving the same way. Every family has 2 children, a boy and a girl, but they were not their biological kids. At age 12, each child was assigned his future role in this dystopian society. Some of them would go be Nurturers (taking care of small children), others would be Pilots(that fly drones), others would be…..whatever role it is given to them. 

One of them, every…many years , would be assigned to be the Receiver . This person was to hold all the memories, from the times before he was born until now.

This society was colorblind! People did not see in colors because the Elders thought seeing the world in color would make people do bad things.

People also were behaving very properly but they had no feelings. They did not know what was sadness, what was to be upset…..and they didn’t know what was love.

Then the Receiver, who is a young boy named Jonas, starts receiving memories from an older person, who was the  previous  Receiver for this community, but he was getting old. So Jonas gets to see, how people were living in the past.  He sees how people were sailing, sledding, he also gets to see mass protests and war. 

He understands that because of these bad things, like war, hatred, famine, the elders have built the perfect world in which they were living in. 

But then he understands another thing too. In this perfect society, when someone did not comply with the rules, when people were getting too old, when babies were considered not appropriate, or when there were twins they were RELEASED.

I had no idea what RELEASED meant at the beginning of the book. I thought that they were sent somewhere. But no, that wasn’t the case. They were actually being killed and there was a ceremony organized when someone was released. Because people had no feelings, they had no idea what they were doing and what death really meant.

Jonas realized and he saves his world, by going beyond the boundaries of his community and releasing all memories back to all people.

This book has made me sad. But it also made me realize that we don’t live in that kind of world. Our world is not perfect. For example, I don’t like animals  to be kept in  Zoos. So we should change that. I also don’t like when kids bully other kids. That should change too. But we live in a world where we care about each other and that matters so much.

Memories matter, love matters, seeing in colors matter. Life as we know it, matter.””