The Giver
by Lois Lowry
Memory is what they banned. He got it anyway.
For you if
you wonder what a comfortable world might be hiding from you to keep you comfortable
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Jonas lives in a society that has eliminated pain, conflict, and difference — and called this success. When he is chosen to receive the memories of the world before, he is given everything his community decided was too dangerous to keep: color, music, loss, love, grandparents, snow. Lois Lowry writes a world so comfortable it's suffocating, and the reader feels the weight of what that comfort costs. The Giver has been banned repeatedly for its treatment of death and euthanasia. Read that differently: it's been banned because it asks what you're protecting people from, and at what price.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
The stated reasons are 'suicide' and 'violence.' The actual threat is the question the book won't stop asking: what does a society trade away to achieve conformity, and who decides what the cost is worth? A world without pain sounds protective until the book shows you what else gets removed along with it — color, music, memory, love. Every challenge to The Giver is a community that found that question uncomfortably close to home.
Where This Book Lives
Part of a Reading Journey
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