How Not to Write a Series or {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry, Part 2 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

How Not to Write a Series

or {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review:

The Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry, Part 2

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Note: Be aware that there are spoilers for all the books in the series in this review that will span the next three weeks in order to give adequate summaries for all four titles along with in-depth individual and series reviews.

The Giver Quartet, young adult fiction, by Lois Lowry features various places in a dystopian world that would seem to have no connection save for the map provided in the slipcase of the hardcovers and also available online. That statement is a little bit of an exaggeration but not by much, as we'll see over the next three weeks. 

Last week, I provided a lengthy summary to give a clear view of the world The Giver, Book 1 of the series quartet of the same name, is set in, as well as offering an introductory review. This week, we'll continue with Books 2-4.

In truth, Lowry didn't intend to write a series based on The Giver, and for that reason I can't really fault her for how ill-conceived the subsequent books are (more on those later). In fact, interviews with the author after the release of The Giver have her laughing at the idea of committing to a return to that world, saying, "That's like asking a woman in labor if she wants to have another baby next year…maybe down the road a little bit, not too far off, maybe I could get excited about it." Seven years later, what's called by the publisher a companion book was released. To me, that description is a big stretch. The first and second books of The Giver Quartet have almost nothing in common and only moot connections are made to the world featured in the first book. 

In Book 2 of the series, Gathering Blue, we're introduced to another dystopian community that's vastly different from the one previously detailed. According to the map, "the Village" is shown on the top right. In this society, the people are ruled by another council that makes all the decisions for the people and ironically calls itself Guardians. There are unabashed social classes depicted in this loosely gathered community. The council itself occupies the upper crust, along with those who are gifted, and these few receive the best of everything. The middle class scrap and fight for their leftovers. The poor, starving, and sick live in The Fen with barely tolerable, swamp-like conditions. 

The main character Kira is deformed, and by all the laws of the Village, she should have been abandoned as a newborn by her mother in the Field of Leaving, where everyone is told that beasts and certain death await. Orphans, those injured, lame, and ill, along with the old and outcast, are all dragged there to die. After Kira's mother's death, she has to prove to the council she can contribute to society or she'll be carted off to feed wild beasts. Her skill as a weaver of color is all that saves her. But the underbelly of this community is utterly rotten, not only within the council, but in the cruel, almost inhumane population that freely abuses and cages their own children and abides in open hostility with each other. Kira with her weaving gift, Thomas with his woodworking, and another child Jo from The Fen with her ability to sing, are all but imprisoned (though in a pampered sort of way) by the council. They're forced to use their gifts in order to allow the community leaders to control the future as they envision it. In the book, it's said that, during their annual Ceremony of the Gathering, a prisoner singer with chained, scarred, and bleeding feet wears the robe Kira spent the year repairing and enhancing and uses the staff Thomas has spent the year creating to tell the tale of their people's history and future. How exactly the council utilizes the gifts that contribute to the song in order to control the future is never made clear. There were no explanations or details given to make any of that understandable in the world readers live in. 

Kira is a compelling character the reader can't help rooting for with her strength, kindness, and tenacity, along with Matty, a filthy, smelly boy from The Fen, who has plucky enthusiasm and a fearless willingness to defy authority. Disappointingly, the villains in this story are never called out for their crimes, nor are their real motives and presumed machinations illuminated. While at least one of the council members is given a face, we learn almost nothing about him or the travesties he was (again, presumably) not alone in perpetuating. These leaders just continue on with the same old same old, seemingly with the main character and the talented ones that live with her maybe making a difference in the community's future with their gifts (though it's as uncertain how Kira, Thomas, and Jo will do this as how the councils controlled the people with a song). In any case, if and when any real changes are effected in this society, it happens off-screen. Ultimately, from what I deciphered at the end of this book and in the ones that follow, Kira, Thomas, and Jo chose not to find out more about the crimes of the council or to do anything but use their gifts somehow to try to change the council's attempts to influence the future for their own (presumably selfish) purposes. The author chose to make all of that vague and unsatisfying for readers. 

Matty disappears near the end of the book. When he comes back, he returns with many surprises for Kira. One of them is her blind father, who wasn't killed by wild animals in the Field of Leaving after all, as she was told he was many years ago. Christopher found his way to a distant place called "Village of Healing" (middle left of the map), where the injured who survived the Field have built a place of mending and acceptance for all outsiders. It's here that we're given the one connection between Books 1 and 2--in the off-hand mention of an unnamed boy from that place who came to the village with a child, and both were initially unharmed. Later, we discover these people are Jonas and Gabe from The Giver, Book 1. From interviews with the author, I'm unclear whether even Lowry realized who they were when she wrote them or if she later decided to make them characters from The Giver. I suspect the latter. 

Messenger, Book 3, is Matty's story, and takes place six to seven years after The Giver and Gathering Blue. The place he lives is inhabited by those who sought refuge after being "discarded" or escaped from other places in this fictional world. Matty lives with Kira's father Christopher (called "Seer"). Kira didn't come to this village with Matty in the last book, believing she could still do good where she currently lived. 

Jonas is revealed cryptically (in otherwise, his name isn't explicitly said) in this book to have become Village "Leader". Matty is given the task of being the Messenger, the only person who can cross the forest between their village and Kira's unharmed. He's also found that he has another gift--the ability to heal living things by touching them. This depletes him in the process, an omen for the future. 

Someone called "Trademaster" has arrived in the village and exchanges gaming machines for a person's best qualities. Yes, you read that right, and my response to what I expect is your puzzled look is that I'm not at all sure why the author chose this weird angle for her story. The effect on the town is profound. People who had previously been kind and generous, always willing to help others, including outsiders, change radically because of the Trademaster's deception and nefarious agenda. They vote to close the village to outsiders. Leader and Seer plead to be allowed three weeks before the wall that keeps all others out is finished being built. Only Matty can go to Kira's village in time and bring her back before the way is shut. But the journey is dangerous, with the forest now sick and violent toward anyone who enters, I presume because of the Trademaster's evil. (Sigh, no explanation is given for how such a thing could be done or what powers beyond trickery the master of trade possesses to force such an unnatural situation.) 

While I liked Matty from Book 2 and he was interesting in this story as well, I can't say I thought this story was well-conceived--especially the villain and how he goes about seducing the townsfolk. The author writes this book and all the others in the series from such a limited point of view, and her characters are simply never curious or ambitious enough to find out the full details the story needs in order to bring a plot full circle, from adequate illumination of the conflict to satisfactory resolution. Who is the Trademaster and what does he really want? How does he pull off these exchanges that somehow make people who were good and kind into monsters? He showed up in the final two books in the series and he was never explained well enough to make sense to me, or to allow me to suspend belief about his abilities, utilizing slot machines to trick people into giving up the things that matter more in life than a few pieces of candy that come out of the games as prizes. What?! If readers had been allowed to find out more about the villain's powers, his motives, if plausible scenarios about how his evil worked were presented, maybe this story could have been genuinely moving. As such, I left it disappointed and very, very disconcerted about the cruel ending that didn't seem fair to me. 

This short book moves devastatingly into Book 4, Son, which brings the reader back into Jonas's village in Book 1, before he fled with the infant Gabe. In this story, the tale of Gabe's biological mother Claire is told. The baby's birth was traumatic, and Claire is reassigned to work at the Fish Hatchery instead of being allowed to go through it again. Eventually, she stops taking the pills that repress her emotions and curiosity. No longer passively accepting her fate and forgetting the child she'd birthed, Claire seeks to identify her son. 

Part one of this story, Before, is nearly over before it begins, ending, naturally, when Jonas flees the Community with Gabe. Claire eventually goes in search of him in Part two, Between. Unfortunately, the Trademaster, who was shortsightedly banished in the last book and free to continue doing harm to anyone he encountered, offers her a very bad trade in exchange for being taken to her son. 

In part three, Beyond, she ends up in the lower right of the map as an old woman, her youth stolen in order to gain what she's wanted most since her son was born. We learn that Jonas and Kira are now married with children (something that happened off-stage between Books 3 and 4 of the series). For his part, Gabriel longs to discover his mother, feeling like he was orphaned without explanation. I was bothered that Jonas didn't seem to have continued to take care of the infant once they arrived in this village. He and Jonas know each other, yes, but the relationship didn't strike me as close as it should have been. Gabe knows of the old woman who showed up out of nowhere in the lower village, but he isn't aware at first and then outright doesn't believe once he's told she's his mother. 

Part one of this story was compelling, seeing Jonas's world from a whole different perspective. As when The Giver ended so suddenly, being propelled into the next part of the book almost felt shocking because everything changed between the two parts, so it was almost like starting a brand new story with a character that might have been a different person for how vast the alterations were in Claire. The segue between parts two and three felt the same to me--drastic and abrupt. That Jonas wasn't willing to tell Gabe everything he knew (or at least hemmed and hawed about it for far too long to be more than contrivance), especially after Jonas and Claire met and the truth was revealed, felt a little too much like author convenience in my mind. When Gabe is finally convinced that Claire is actually his birth mother, he has no choice but to deal with the Trademaster once and for all. In order to do that, a magical power called veering is all but handed to him from the moment he realizes he needs it. I fully anticipated a bad ending to this story, but luckily the author didn't do what I fearfully expected. What follows is tragic, frustrating, and yet for the most part a fitting ending to the series. 

The last three books in this series follow the same pattern as Book 1 with innocent young adults being the ones to discover the horrors perpetrated for countless generations against their communities, usually by greedy leaders. These children are helpless to act against such a force, and therefore little or nothing presumably changes. Perhaps the author was hoping readers would accept a "Be the Change" attitude in these powerless heroes? Or maybe she just wanted to show that sometimes in life nothing gets better with time. People just keep making the same mistakes and/or are powerless to act against those who seek to control them. Only those in charge--the wealthy and powerful--hold the cards of change. If the latter is the case, then that lesson was slammed home mercilessly four tragic times in the course of this series. Next week, I'll conclude with a thorough exploration of the devastating themes in The Giver Quartet. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

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