I just finished reading Son, the final book in Lois Lowry’s The Giver Quartet. I first read The Giver in 1994 while in sixth grade, and I just read Son in 2024… 30 years later. I didn’t know it was a series of four books until my aunt bought the set as a gift for my daughter on her birthday. She quickly read the entire series then I picked them up to read with my son.
I’m a much slower reader than everyone else in our house. By the time we got to Son, I think my son lost interest in it, so we set it down for a while. He recently picked it up and finished it on his own without me. I felt left out, but when both he and my daughter said the ending wasn’t good, I felt determined to finish it and judge for myself.
They were wrong: the ending is perfect.
I first read The Giver such a long time ago, but I’m sure I identified with Jonas. I might have even been the same age as him, but I don’t think I questioned authority until later, when I got to high school.
The intermediary stories–Gathering Blue and Messenger–didn’t resonate with me, possibly because I knew they were building to the final story. It would only be fair to give the entire series a reread now to see how each piece interlocks.
I had an advantage reading the last story 30 years later. Seeing Jonas’ world from the view of another character brought back nostaligia of reading it the first time. And as a parent, Claire’s journey to find Gabe tugged at my heart. The frustration of her proximity to her child, only to be swept away into memory loss, made it difficult to see how she would ever find her way back. And for her to sacrifice everything to merely see Gabe–largely as a stranger–would have been a sad ending, but her motivations to see her child safe and happy resonated with my own life’s goals.
I think with age, my kids will change their opinion of the ending and decide that it was good. Claire is a brave woman, and completely unselfish, and she didn’t want to spoil what she did have with Gabe at the end of her life. My kids see things from Gabe’s point of view, that Claire should have approached Gabe sooner and spent more of her life together with him. But I think both mother and son had to feel the pain of sacrifice to win against the evil schemes of Trademaster.
The Trademaster character should have had more presence throughout the series; he seemed a bit contrived to show up again at the end of the story. But maybe there were more clues to his history and motivations throughout the books that I missed during the first reading. Ultimately, these are young adult books, so their length is short and there’s only so much character that can be packed into so few pages.
I highly recommend reading the Quartet if you haven’t. It’s a poignant view of humanity at the end of time, but hopeful too in that a new community of people emerge from the remnants of the strange tribes that have settled along this one river.