Son a Disappointment

Unless you are an avid book lover you just might think this post is going to be about a naughty child of mine.  Fortunately, my disappointment is not in a child, but in the most recent installment of Lois Lowry's series that started with Newbery-Award-Winning The Giver.

The Giver is a simply wonderful piece of dystopian literature for young teens (although I very much enjoyed it both times I read it as an adult) which was followed up by the less memorable Gathering Blue and thought-provoking The Messenger (my review here).  I was pretty excited when I heard she had released another book last fall, but I somehow didn't get around to reading it until last week.

Don't you just hate it when you anticipate something for a year and then it falls flat?

Son, this fourth book in the series, seems to exist merely to wrap up a few loose ends from the previous books.  It was an interesting idea to revisit Jonas's village and Gabe's story from the perspective of Gabe's birthmother, and it started out pretty well (even though I felt like I was reading the same story again only from a different perspective), but then she just seemed to randomly revisit all the old characters and try to connect them together while giving the reader a peek into "where they are now."  The confrontation with the Trademaster was particularly jarring and contrived, I thought.

Really, I think she could have just summarized this book with "and they all lived happily ever after."

Except that is inconsistent with the characters and world Lowry introduced us to.  The previous books were filled with richly developed characters and comprehensively described societies.  They showed us that the decisions we make have consequences, they taught us where true value lies, they reminded us to learn from the mistakes of the past--but these lessons were learned the hard way.  As nice as it might be to hope for a "happily ever after", Lowry had previously illustrated that we are human and there simply is no fairy-tale-ending on this earth.  I was disappointed in her betrayal of the society she had so eloquently created.  I think it was better to leave the reader wondering and caring about the characters than to try to wrap everything up and tie a pretty bow on top.