The Giver By Lois Lowry

As a reader, I found this book to be confusing at points throughout. Once I got the hang of what was going on, I caught on fairly quickly, but then the end left me wondering again what happened. That is also part of what made this book a good one to read though. It keeps the reader engaged by making them wonder what is going to happen next, and makes it so you want to continue turning the page to see what happens in the end. I noticed this when they skipped his name in the ceremony. Instead of stopping at the end of the chapter you just had to keep reading to find out why it got skipped. Same with when he meets the giver and starts his training, you want to see how the giver is going to train him and the things that he will pass on.

As a teacher I could see myself using this book. I would use it for upper elementary or junior high school because I'm not sure how well it would go over with younger kids. I think that reading this book with students would require a lot of discussion and clarification. I would assign a few chapters a night and discuss them the next day, so that everyone gets the chance to see what is happening in the book. This book might also carry over to a social studies lesson where kids could describe their perfect world. Discussions about utopian and dystopian societies could cross over to social studies as well. A thought provoking discussion could be started by asking students if they would like a world like this, where they are sheltered from everything, or if they would rather have the freedom to choose what they want to do like when they get a bike and when they cut their hair, etc. It would also be interesting to have students draw what they think this society looks like, and then  make another drawing or model of what their perfect society would look like. Overall, I think that this book would be a good one to use with older students and would initiate conceptual thinking about the world they live in.