Imagine you are a 14-year-old girl who has been told at age 12 that your future job is to produce babies for the better of the community. Imagine that your whole life has been under the command of the government and you see nothing wrong with it. Now imagine worse – you are pregnant and there are medical difficulties when your baby is being born. Worst of all, you will never get to see your child again.
This is the situation for Claire in Lois Lowry’s newest book in the Giver Quartet, Son, which came out on October 2. Son is set in a futuristic community that is carefully regulated and controlled to ensure Sameness. Roles are assigned to citizens, and Claire is destined to be a Birthmother.
This novel is set around the same time as the events in The Giver, a play that the Harriton Theater Company will be producing this November.
Son is divided into three sections: “Before,” “Between,” and “Beyond.” In “Before,” Claire (age 14) gives birth to a son named Gabriel, but there are complications with the birthing process and she is placed in a new job at the fish hatchery.
The authorities forget to give her pills that suppress emotion in the wake of her disastrous birth, so Claire cannot stop thinking about her son and what it would be like if she could have kept him. When Jonas, the protagonist of The Giver, escapes from the community with Gabe, she is heartbroken and follows them Elsewhere, beyond the community, on a boat.
“Between” takes readers farther away from the familiar territory of the community and ushers them into new lands. After the boat is wrecked in a storm, a dying Claire washes up on the shores of a village in Elsewhere. Her memory of the traumatic events in her past is gone, but it gradually resurfaces until Claire completely remembers.
With the help of the lamed Einar, she refocuses her goal of finding Gabriel and trains to climb the forbidding cliffs surrounding the village and search for him. What happens next in “Beyond?” Where is Gabriel now, and how will Claire find him? A dark force is stirring in the world of Son, and Gabriel must fight a final battle to reunite with the mother he never knew.
This book was a winner from the beginning. Themes such as the power of a mother’s love and the importance of controlling one’s own destiny underscore a simple yet powerful story with characters with whom the audience falls in love. Claire is a determined and strong heroine who matures and develops over the course of the story.
A warning to readers who have not read the other books in the Giver Quartet: You should definitely finish them before diving into Son. Although they are not completely overpowering, there are references and characters from previous books that would be more fully appreciated in Son if they were in context.
Lowry’s Son is a moving and strong completion to the Giver Quartet — its thought-provoking ideas and dynamic characters make this a book worth buying.
