THE GIVER heheh

 So, the Giver, right? I got recommended this book by my English teacher in 6th grade. At the

time, I was like, “Wtf Ms. Giermak, I thought you were supposed to be a good English

teacher.” The book looked bland to the point of tears, with some weird white spiky tree framing

the cover. I didn’t read it back then, but then a few weeks ago I picked it up and was like, “Oh

man, this is gonna come in handy for english blogs.”

So, I read it. It was interesting, to say the least. The first few pages were pretty confusing. I was just shot into a dystopian world of no color and no feeling and basically nothing, and it took a moment to process it. Afterwards, though, it got much better. 

The story is about Jonas, a 12 year old boy who lives in a creepy futuristic world where there is no emotion, no color, no pain and no happiness. However, Jonas can see colors, and so he is assigned the role of the Receiver, to receive all the memories of humankind from the Giver. The society always needs a receiver and giver, as without them humankind’s memories are released to everyone and are too much for them to take. I’m getting chills writing about this: envisioning a future like this for future kinds is really quite scary. Ok, anyways, back to the topic. Yeah, basically Jonas slowly finds that his parents will never love him and that the people in his society are murdering people instead of sending them to the “Elsewhere”, a kind of “heaven” in their world. He devises a plan with the Giver to release the memories back into society. 

Now, if I’m being perfectly honest with you, the book creeped me out a lot. Just imagine a future where they murder old people and say they’re sending them to a supposed heaven, a world without color, music, emotions or pain. It sounds dreadfully scary. Not in the sense that there are monsters lurking. It's creepy because so many joys in the world would be gone forever, which kind of reminds me of an AI utopia. I don’t know why exactly it's so terrifying, but there's just something so sinister about the society. Ok, anyways, other than it being horrific, it was an amazing book. There was a lot of emotional depth, which is kind of funny because it's describing a place with no emotion. The Giver and Jonas, exchanging memories and plotting to release them into society because everyone was just living a semi conscious life, Jonas’s parents being irritated, (well, as irritated as they could be) at him not showing up early to an event because they were going to look like bad parents rather than caring about if their son was safe and Jonas finding out that sending people to the “elsewhere” was just injecting poison into their system was just so scary. I feel like many times, when we think of a perfect world, we think of everything working at the right time at the right place with the right person, everybody getting what they want with no pain or suffering. However, as demonstrated by this book where we have the seemingly “perfect” world, with no mistakes, no hardships, everything is as wrong as can be. It is just so intrinsically against our human nature to have a world with no mistakes, to have everything in the textbook definition of perfect. Do we really want to live our lives with no mistakes? Do we really want no hardship, to just live in a bubble our entire lives until we are forced to die? Do we really, just for the sake of living in a “perfect” world, give up the whole meaning of “to live”? 

ANYWAYS, yeah this book was really fun to read, Ms. Giermak was a W teacher, and I would definitely recommend it. Bye bye now.