![]() | |
Author | Lois Lowry |
---|---|
Language | English |
Series | The Giver Quartet |
Genre | Young adult fiction |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | October 2, 2012 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 393 |
ISBN | 978-0-54788-720-3 |
Preceded by | Messenger |
Son is a 2012 young adult dystopian novel by American author Lois Lowry. The fourth and final book in The Giver Quartet , the story takes place during and after the first book in the series, The Giver . The story follows Claire, the Birthmother of Gabriel, who was marked for "release" in The Giver before being taken out of the community by Jonas. Claire, obsessed with finding her son, embarks on a journey out of the community in an attempt to follow and find him. [1] The novel explores themes of love, obligation, sacrifice, and loss. [2] Son received mostly positive reviews from critics.
Son is written in three parts, each with a subtitle: Before, Between, and Beyond.
Before takes place in the same location, "The Community," and at approximately the same time as The Giver. Claire's assigned occupation in the community is Birthmother, and her primary responsibility is to give birth. At the beginning of the novel, Claire is nearing the end of her pregnancy. She gives birth to her child at 14, but complications during delivery necessitate birth by cesarean section. Three weeks after giving birth, Claire reports to the birthing unit office and is reassigned to work at the Fish Hatchery. After she leaves, she inquires after the baby she birthed, and the officer informs her that the baby is healthy and accidentally informs Claire that the child is male and number Thirty-Six in his year.
Claire retains curiosity for her son as she begins work at the Fish Hatchery and begins casually volunteering at the infant nurturing center to see him. As she plays with Thirty-Six, she quickly grows to love him, a feeling she finds that she alone experiences. She later realizes that all adult community members take pills that suppress emotions. As a Birthmother, she was instructed not to take the pills, but the matter was overlooked in her reassignment. Claire is told that Thirty-Six is going "Elsewhere" for his failure to thrive according to the community's standards. Before she can do anything, her son is saved and taken away by Jonas, the protagonist from The Giver . Claire attempts to follow them on a supply boat, but it soon encounters a strong storm and is shipwrecked.
In Between, Claire is rescued from the beach on which the supply boat shipwrecked. She is taken in by a midwife, Alys, while she tries to regain her memory, since she has suffered from temporary amnesia after the wreck. Once her memories return, Lame Einar is a man who trains her to be able to escape the village they are in. She is forced to climb a steep cliff up out of the valley. Then, she meets an evil entity, Trademaster, which offers to take her to her son if she trades her youth. Claire agrees and is turned into an old woman, and her son, Gabriel "Gabe", is located.
In Beyond, Gabe is now a young man with the power to see into other people's minds for a split second, "veering." Gabe is also curious about his old home and his real mother.
Meanwhile, Jonas notices Claire, finds out that she is the mother of Gabe, and convinces Gabe that Claire is his mother, aged by the evil Trademaster.
Gabe is then told that the Trademaster must be killed. He meets the Trademaster, veers into its body, and understands that the Trademaster is dying from starvation because he feeds off his victims' suffering. Gabe then tells the Trademaster of all the people that he has tried to destroy and how they are living happily again. That destroys the Trademaster, and when Gabe returns home, Claire has turned back into a young woman.
Themes in Son include those of love, obligation, sacrifice, and loss. [2] Lowry had originally not planned on writing Son or any sequels to The Giver, but she was inspired to write the story after she "decided to describe what became of him [Gabriel] as he grew up." [3] Initially intending to center the book on Gabriel and his determination to discover his past, Lowry instead found herself being drawn to write more about Claire. She stated, "I wasn't aware of it at the time... but when I was writing of her yearning to find her boy, that was coming out of my own yearning to have my own son back." [4]
Reception for Son has been mostly positive, with the book gaining starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist. [5] [6] A reviewer for The Washington Post wrote that the book had a "quiet climax", stating that the ultimate "power of this parable" is that "It confronts us with some of the choices we are making and plays out the consequences." [7] Robin Wasserman of The New York Times commented that Son did well as a standalone novel and praised Lowry's descriptions in the book. [2] The Boston Globe criticized the book's "over-elaborations and pacing" while writing that "overall the journey is still worth the effort". [8] The AV Club commented that while the book could have used more world-building, it is also "just plain good young-adult literature". [9]
The Giver is a 1993 American young adult dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry, set in a society which at first appears to be utopian but is revealed to be dystopian as the story progresses.
Lois Ann Lowry is an American writer. She is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Giver Quartet, Number the Stars, and Rabble Starkey. She is known for writing about difficult subject matters, dystopias, and complex themes in works for young audiences.
The City of Ember is a post-apocalyptic novel by Jeanne DuPrau that was published in 2003. The story is about Ember, a post-apocalyptic underground city threatened by aging infrastructure and corruption. The young protagonists, Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow, follow clues left behind by the original builders of the City of Ember, to safety in the outside world.
Gathering Blue is a young adult-dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry and was published on September 25, 2000. A companion book to The Giver (1993), it is set in the same future time period and universe, treats some of the same themes, and is followed by Messenger (2004) and Son (2012) in The Giver Quartet.
Messenger is a 2004 young adult dystopian novel by American author Lois Lowry, as is the third installment of The Giver Quartet, which began with the 1993 Newbery Medal-winning novel The Giver. The story takes place about six years after the events of The Giver, and the events of Gathering Blue, the preceding novel in the series. Characters from both of the previous books reappear in Messenger and give the novels a stronger continuity.
Number the Stars is a work of historical fiction by the American author Lois Lowry about the escape of a family of Jews from Copenhagen, Denmark, during World War II.
The Silent Boy is a 2003 book written by Lois Lowry. Categorized as both a young adult novel and historical fiction, The Silent Boy is set in a 20th-century farm community. The story was inspired by a pile of photos that Lowry found and which are interspersed throughout the narrative. The story is told by Katy Thatcher, the young daughter of a small-town physician whose heart is softened by a local boy with a mental condition disabling him from speaking.
Mama Flora's Family is a 1997 historical fiction novel by Alex Haley and David Stevens. The story spans from the 1920s to the 1970s as it follows Flora, a daughter of poor black Mississippi sharecroppers, and her descendants. Haley died before completing the novel, with Stevens finishing the story line.
Locked in Time is a 1985 suspense novel by Lois Duncan. The story centers around Nore, a seventeen-year-old girl who moves into a new home with her father and her new stepfamily. Soon after she meets her stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister for the first time, Nore begins to suspect something is not quite right about her stepfamily. The author states that the novel explores some of the issues surrounding having eternal life. Duncan says she developed the idea for the novel when one of her daughters was thirteen years old and was having issues with her body image. Duncan mentions that her daughter was "taking everything out" on her, and she began to wonder what it would be like if her daughter never outgrew her adolescence.
Gossamer (2006) is a novel with elements of both fantasy and realism for young adults by Lois Lowry.
A Garden of Earthly Delights is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Vanguard in 1967. Her second book published, it is the first in her "Wonderland Quartet" followed by Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland (1971). It was a finalist for the 1968 annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
A Summer to Die was Lois Lowry's first novel.
Divergent, the debut novel of American novelist Veronica Roth, was published by HarperCollins Children's Books in 2011. The novel is the first in the Divergent series, a trilogy of young adult dystopian novels set in a post-apocalyptic version of Chicago. The society defines its citizens by their social and personality-related affiliation with one of five factions. This rigid system has removed the threat of anyone exercising independent will and re-threatening the population's safety. In the story, Beatrice Prior joins the ranks of the Dauntless and explores her new identity as "Tris". Underlying the action- and dystopian-focused main plot is a romantic subplot between Tris and "Four", one of her instructors in the Dauntless faction.
The History of Us is a 2013 novel by Leah Stewart. The book released on January 8, 2013, through Touchstone Books and concerns three siblings who must review both their past and their relationship with each other after their aunt plans to sell their childhood home. Stewart began writing the book due to an interest in the "dynamic between coming to see what’s good about the place where you are living and continuing to feel like you’ve been displaced from where you should be".
The Giver is a 2014 American dystopian drama film directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Jeff Bridges, Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård, Katie Holmes, Cameron Monaghan, Taylor Swift, and Emma Tremblay. The film is based on the 1993 young adult novel of the same name by Lois Lowry. The Giver premiered on August 11, 2014, and was released theatrically in the United States on August 15, 2014. It grossed $67 million on a $25 million budget and received a People's Choice Award nomination for "Favorite Dramatic Movie".
The Giver Quartet is a series of four books about a dystopian world by Lois Lowry. The quartet consists of The Giver (1993), Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004), and Son (2012). The first book won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 10 million copies. The story takes place in the world of The Giver. Each book has a different protagonist, but is set in the same futuristic era.
The Knife and the Butterfly is a young adult novel by Ashley Hope Pérez, published in 2011 by Carolrhoda Books. The novel, which explores the lives of two teenage gang members in Houston, a Hispanic boy named Azael and a White girl named Lexi, is based on a 2006 gang-related death in that city.
The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old African-American girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting.
Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World is a New York Times best selling young adult novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, published October 12, 2021 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. It is the sequel to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.
Kings of the Wyld is a 2017 fantasy novel by Nicholas Eames. It is the first in the trilogy, The Band. The book is about a retired band of mercenaries that come out of retirement to save the daughter of one member.
(10 out of 10 book)