It would be easy to be lulled by these opening chapters, thinking them merely a supremely well-written version of something we’ve seen before - the generic proper nouns the placid, unquestioning populace the spunky protagonist primed to puncture its illusions.

Fortunately, because this is Lois Lowry, the collision isn’t a rehashing of the same dystopian fireworks we’ve seen too many times before, but a quiet, sorrowful, deeply moving exploration of the powers of empathy and the obligations of love.Īnd fortunately for those of us who haven’t read “The Giver” since elementary school, “Son” easily stands on its own. With “Son,” she’s woven these three disparate worlds together, heroes and fates colliding in a final, epic struggle. “Son” is being touted as the fourth book in the “Giver” quartet, as Lowry has previously published two loosely related companion novels, “Gathering Blue” (2000) and “Messenger” (2004). Now, nearly 20 years later - and with a glut of fictional oppressive societies leaving many of us with a bit of dystopia fatigue - she’s returned with a concluding volume that gloriously rebels against the restraints of the very genre she helped to create. In many ways, Lowry invented the contemporary young adult dystopian novel. It’s difficult to imagine, in our post-“Hunger Games” world, how unusual and unsettling it was then for a children’s book to touch on euthanasia, suicide and murder, to couch it all in a bleak vision of political and emotional oppression and to leave its protagonist’s ultimate fate undecided. Suzanne Collins had just sold her first teleplays for the gentle, nonviolent world of children’s television, and “dystopia” was a 50-cent SAT word unlikely to trip off the average sixth-grade tongue. Rowling had not yet begun scribbling magic words on the back of cafe napkins and Stephenie Meyer had just graduated from her (presumably vampire-free) high school.

In 1993, when Lois Lowry shocked adult and child sensibilities alike with her Newbery Medal-winning novel “The Giver,” J.

Son by lois lowry