When Jonas takes Gabe away with him, Claire follows, and her quest, even though it’s just to a simple fishing village, felt powerful. I almost cried, and I also wanted to cheer, at the Claire’s resolution not to take the pills: “She would rather die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son”. I have, however, lost my own mother recently, and that may be partly why Claire’s story resonated so strongly with me. I’m not a mother, and I can’t even begin to imagine how that would feel. Instead, she’s supposed to take pills to numb the pain of loss.

Here’s the thing: as Gabe’s Birthmother, Claire isn’t supposed to see him again after birth - she wasn’t allowed to hold him, or even know his gender. At the end of The Giver, however, Jonas takes Gabe with him when he leaves town.

Her son is Gabe, the baby in The Giver who wasn’t performing at par with his age group and so had to be “released” (killed). I can’t imagine being a mother at fourteen worse, I don’t even want to imagine being twelve and being told that the only thing I have left to do in life is create a set number of babies, then retire.ĭespite its title, Son is really about a mother, Claire. The “young girl” is Claire, fourteen years old, assigned to be a Birthmother. From the very first line: “The young girl cringed when they buckled the eyeless leather mask around the upper half of her face and blinded her,” Son transported me right back into Lowry’s world, but a much darker, more frightening one than what I remember from The Giver. Son is a far more adult, far more sombre book than The Giver, or perhaps I have just grown up. I’ve grown up with these books, and reaching the end of this series feels, in many ways, like ending a chapter in my own life. So you can imagine the chill I got when, reading Son at 29, I realized that I must again be fairly close to the age of Jonas in this story. One of the reasons The Giver resonated so much with me is that I read it when I was fairly close to the age of its protagonist Jonas.

Lois Lowry’s The Giver changed my life when I was 14 (see story here), and reading Son feels like coming full circle. I can’t even begin to explain how much this book means to me.

The giver novel