Son

September 10, 2012
Drawing characters and themes from The Giver and its companions, Gathering Blue and Messenger, Lowry concludes her Giver Quartet nearly 20 years after the Newbery Medal–winning first book was published. The story is divided into three sections, and in the completely absorbing opening, Lowry transports readers back to the horrifying world from which Jonas came. The spotlight is on 14-year-old Claire, a Birthmother who is given an emergency Caesarean to save “the Product.” The child survives, but Claire is coldly “decertified” and sent to work elsewhere, mystified as to what happened to her and her baby. Those familiar with The Giver will feel the pieces fall into place as Claire figures out which Product is hers and tracks his progress. Part two details Claire’s decade-long struggle to remember who she is, and it suffers slightly from having a main character afflicted with a well-worn plot device (amnesia); the final third reunites characters from all three previous novels for a showdown with evil incarnate. If the latter sections don’t quite keep up with the thrilling revelations of the first, Lowry still ties together these stories in a wholly satisfying way. Ages 12–up.

Starred review from September 1, 2012

Gr 6 Up-This final volume in the sequence of books that began with The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) returns for the first time to the regimented community of that book. Lowry recounts the events through the eyes of a new character, Claire, a Birthmother. When her first "Production" goes wrong, she endures a cesarean delivery and is summarily reassigned to the fish hatchery. But she can never let go of the idea of the son to whom she has given birth (Product #36) and manages to track him down in visits to the Nurturing Center. The baby turns out to be Gabe, the infant taken in by Jonas's family in The Giver. Claire meets Jonas's father and is able to maintain a tenuous relationship with her child. When Gabe is set to be "released" rather than permanently assigned to a family, things look dire indeed. Claire manages to escape the community on a supply boat headed "Elsewhere." Washed up on a beach after a storm, she has no memory of who she is or from whence she came. With the help of the villagers who have taken her in, she slowly regains some bits of her past and sets out to find her son. A harrowing encounter with the Trademaster leads her finally to Gabe, whom she finds in the village introduced in Messenger, along with Jonas, who is now appropriately the scholar/librarian of the community. Infinitely more satisfying than the previous installment, Son is a tender conclusion to this memorable story, and definitely the best of the books in this sequence since The Giver itself.-Tim Wadham, Children's Literature Consultant, Fenton, MO

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