With this being Banned Books Week, I couldn’t help but think about all the books I love that get challenged over and over again. Of Mice and Men, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Bridge to Terabithia, To Kill a Mockingbird…the list goes on and on. We have all heard the usual arguments for banning books from schools: that children need to be sheltered from any book that includes graphic violence, sexual content, occult references, and so forth. Most of these challenges, sadly, stem from ignorance about the stories.
The Giver, by Lois Lowry, published in 1993
The Giver has been on the banned-books list since 1999. Those who would ban it have argued that it presents suicide, infanticide and euthanasia in a positive light, and that it contains inappropriate occult references. Not only are these accusations a little outrageous, they actually manage to encourage the same behavior that The Giver aims to critique.
The Giver is the story of 12-year-old Jonas, a boy living in a futuristic utopian society. In Jonas’s world, each young person is assigned a career by the Elder Counsel at the age of 12. Jonas, who has always been particularly perceptive to the world around him, is chosen to be the Receiver of Memories, the sole person who keeps the memories of the entire community. These memories, of War, Pain, and even of colors are from before the adoption of “sameness.” Under “sameness,” there is no color, people are chastised for being mean, and every stage of life is carefully regimented into achievements. The Giver, the outgoing Keeper of Memories, reveals to Jonas that while their utopia may be free of pain and violence, it is also void of all intense emotion. Jonas is given memories of another world in which people picked their own jobs and raised their own children—but that world was filled with pain, betrayal, and anger. Perhaps the most disturbing memory he is shown is what really happens when someone is “released” from the world he knows: they are either euthanized or killed as infants. Ultimately, the story follows Jonas through his confusion and ultimate discovery of what matters in the world.
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Surely it’s no fun to find out that someone hates your book. Hates it possibly without having read it, not because it was poorly written or outside their genre, but for the arbitrary reason that it challenged them too much. Hates it for reasons that maybe have nothing to do with you and everything to do with how little they trust teenagers to judge for themselves. That’s got to sting. But it’s also one of the best things that can happen to your book.
