He settled himself on the sledge and hugged Gabe close. The hill was steep but the snow was powdery and soft, and he knew that this time there would be no ice, no fall, no pain. Inside his freezing body, his heart surged with hope.
They started down.
Jonas felt himself losing consciousness and with his whole being willed himself to stay upright atop the sledge, clutching Gabriel, keeping him safe. The runners sliced through the snow and the wind whipped at his face as they sped in a straight line through an incision that seemed to lead to the final destination, the place that he had always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that held their future and their past.
He forced his eyes open as they went downwards, downwards, sliding, and all at once he could see lights, and he recognised them now. He knew they were shining through the windows of rooms, that they were the red, blue and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love.
Downwards, downwards, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were waiting, too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing.
Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.
It’s hard to identify when I began to be aware that The Giver was different from the previous twenty-plus novels I had written for kids. Not while I was writing it, surely. I felt that I was writing an adventure story, trying to make each chapter a cliffhanger; well, I had done that precise thing in Number the Stars several years before. I was trying to create a likable, sympathetic main character with a lot of integrity and a certain amount of introspection: just what I had done in every book I had written for years, from A Summer to Die to Anastasia Krupnik and Rabble Starkey.
So it was not during the writing process, there at my desk for those weeks – eventually months – in 1993 that I realised something was unusual.
But it was also not the day that a radiogram with the news of the Newbery Medal was slipped under the door of my cabin on a boat in Antarctica a year or so later.
It was someplace in between. It was when I began to hear from readers.
I have always heard from readers. I like your book. It made me laugh. Please write back. Anastasia is just like me. Meg is just like me. J.P. is just like me. Please write back. Write more books. Put my name in a book. Send me your autograph.
But suddenly, after The Giver was published, the tone of the letters was different. They still came, most of them, from young people. But now they were not class assignments. They weren’t decorated with stickers and doodles.
Instead, they were long, carefully thought-out, passionate responses to a book that had raised questions in their minds: questions about their own lives, their own futures, decisions they were making, values that they were wondering about for the first time.
At the same time, there came letters from adults. Not the usual school librarians, not the occasional parent. These letters came from adults unrelated to the world of “children’s literature” – these were from adults who had probably not read a “kids’ book” since they were kids themselves. One came from the CEO of a major corporation. One from a Baptist minister. One from a Trappist monk. One from a victim of a multiple-personality disorder. And countless others from the most ordinary of people who seemed, actually, to be startled that a book they picked up casually (“My son asked me to read this.” “I picked this up at a bookstore because the cover looked intriguing.” “My cleaning lady recommended this book to me!”) had so affected them that they felt compelled, for the first time in their lives, to contact an author.
My mailman, Jack, an affable guy, began to make wry comments about the weight of his bag. I gave him a large tip at Christmas. By the time I found myself in Antarctica that winter of the Newbery – surrounded by icebergs – I had begun to think that my mail, back home, was something of a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon.
The challenges came a little later. They took me by surprise. Suddenly there began to appear an occasional distraught letter from someone who called me “godless” or “perverted”.
“Jesus would not be pleased with you,” one woman wrote me in what appeared to be a trembling hand.
A website appeared devoted entirely to a denunciation of The Giver and referring to it – or perhaps to me; it wasn’t quite clear – as The Antichrist.
I found my name on the official list of “Most Challenged Authors” again and again.
A town in the Midwest removed the book from its public schools.
A public hearing was held in a California town to deal with “The Giver issue”.
And I suppose I should tell this part, too: one piece of mail was disconcerting enough that I had a conference with the FBI and was advised, for my own safety, not to visit a particular city in the USA in the immediate future.
The Giver began to be translated into other languages, and with its French title, Le Passeur, it was voted the favourite of the children of France and Belgium one year.
I was told that it was the first American children’s book translated into Thai.
It was used in the tenth grade in German public schools. In Germany an entire population of young people must study the seduction of totalitarianism as part of their own country’s tragic history. Many of them start by reading The Giver.
Today, as I write this, four cities/towns in the USA have selected The Giver as their “community read” the book that the entire town is asked to read, and then – picture this, a whole town! Adults and kids! What a wonderful thing! – to discuss.
Schools across the country make it part of their required reading. Christian churches use it as part of their religious curriculum. And at the same time, countless people give it as a Bar Mitzvah gift.
I could not possibly have planned any of this. I sat down in 1993 to write an adventure story and to explore, for my own reasons, the concept of the importance of memory in our lives.
Somehow, unintentionally, I tapped into something that fed a hunger out there.
It is not always a comfortable thing to be the centre of so much attention and controversy. But it makes me think about what it means to be “comfortable” – the very thing that the community of The Giver had achieved at such a great price. It was a community without danger or pain. But it was also a community without music, colour or art. And it was a community without books.
Lois Lowry
Well, once I spent a very quiet hour in the hills on the island of Bali. I was there with my friend Kitty, but she had climbed down a steep slope to see a ruined temple, and I was hot and tired, and decided to wait for her partway down. I saw an old fashioned soft-drink cooler, the kind where you lift a lid and reach