“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin (1993)
192 pages

This is one of those books that I don’t really have anything much to say about. It seems like everyone has read the book, and most of those who have read it loved it. I liked it a lot, though it won’t make it into any sort of favourite books lists of mine. I especially liked the main character, Jonas.

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1994.

It’s the future, and everything is perfect. No issues, no problems. Family members get together and talk about their feelings, everyone is polite, there’s no hunger or poverty or war, and everything is carefully planned and executed. Everything and everyone is equal, the same, normal. Welcome to the future: utopia has never been this flawed.

Everything starts out very smoothly. Jonas’s community seemed like a very nice place to live in, and I began to wonder what was wrong with this world Lowry has created. After a while, though, the sameness of everything gets a bit disquieting, and when I realised what was missing — colours, memory, music, truth, human emotions — I was rather freaked out by the whole thing. Jonas’s father and the baby that was released was bad enough, but when Jonas’s parents just laugh when he asks whether they love him, it gave me a shudder. Use another word, they say. “Love” is not a precise word, they say: “[it's] a very generalised word, so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete”.

Lovely little place, this utopia. Looks like I’m not moving there after all. Any list about books concerning dystopian fiction should have The Giver in it, that’s what I think.

I like the ending, uncertain as it is. Not only Jonas gets to make his choice and struggle with what comes with it, we get to decide ourselves what happens. It left me thinking long after I closed the book.

I have the other two books by Lois Lowry which are loosely related to The Giver in my reading list: Gathering Blue and Messenger. I think I’ll also pick up Lowry’s Number the Stars one of these days.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Greenwillow (an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books) (1998)
(First published 1996)
224 pages

Uh. I guess I am in the minority for not loving this book like most other YA fantasy fans out there? I liked it well enough; I just didn’t love it like I expected I would.

Also, I must admit I am one of those people who actually do judge a book by its cover. I believe publishers have the facility (and the responsibility!) to make covers that are both attractive and relevant to the story, and this particular cover leaves me frowning at it. I can’t make out who it’s supposed to be. I wonder if the actual target audience of the book would find the cover attractive? I certainly don’t. I wouldn’t have idly picked this one up just because of the book design, that’s for sure — it’s a good thing that I pay attention to book recommendations. ;)

The Thief is the first book in Megan Whalen Turner’s trilogy, and it’s the first book by the author I’ve read. The book is also a Newbery Honor book. It’s in the first person (which probably explains my grouses with it!) and set in world almost like a Greek version of our own. Gen, the narrator, brags that he’s the best thief ever, and ends up being caught. He’s then roped into the King’s service into stealing something really valuable.

It started off really slowly for me. I started it, got distracted because I didn’t quite care for Gen’s voice and stopped reading and had to re-start again, and only did that because it was a library book and it was due in a few days. I did finish it at one sitting once I got past the second chapter; it’s a really short book.

I was rather surprised when I found out that there were cross-recommendations from those who’ve read both The Lymond Chronicles and this series — I couldn’t quite see the similarities here, but apparently it’s more obvious in the later books. I’ll continue with The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, I think; I’m curious enough to see what’s up next for Gen, though I’m not in a rush to check the books out now from the library.

The story’s ok. There’s nothing that I really didn’t like — it’s just that I couldn’t find anything really outstanding in the whole narrative. I like some of the characters — Pol and Sophos, mostly, and the pantheon and world-creation myths were interesting. For a narrative in the first person, Gen really holds back a lot of things from the reader. So when things fall into place, I was rather irritated with him — shouldn’t he have said something about all this sooner? Which made the ending rather problematic, at least for me. And here comes some spoilers, sorry, since this is the part that left me feeling a bit bewildered with the whole thing.

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