#20 in Dystopian
The Giver
- 200
- Pages
- about 3.5 h
- Reading time
- Film 2014
- On screen
- Newbery Medal
- Hal Clement Award
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Our view
“The Giver” does a great deal in about two hundred pages: a community that looks perfect slowly shows what it gave up for its calm, and the discovery lands harder because it is seen through a twelve-year-old’s eyes. The language suits school-age readers, yet its questions about memory, pain and choice stay with adults, and some readers come back to it for years. A good first dystopia, more thoughtful than action-packed.
Worth knowing Lois Lowry has said the idea grew partly from visiting her elderly father, who was losing his memory. Published in 1993, it won the Newbery Medal and has also been one of the most challenged books in American schools. It reads as complete, but it became the first of a quartet: Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004) and Son (2012), which draws the threads together. Jeff Bridges, who produced the 2014 film, had tried for years to get it made.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Giver is a 1993 young adult dystopian novel written by American author Lois Lowry, and it is set in a society which at first appears to be utopian but revealed to be dystopian as the story progresses. In the novel, the society has taken away pain and strife by converting to "Sameness", a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. In an effort to preserve order, the society has a true sense of equality and lacks any color, climate, or terrain. The protagonist of the story, a 12-year-old boy named Jonas, is selected to inherit the position of Receiver of Memory, the person who stores all the memories of the time before Sameness. Jonas struggles with concepts of the new emotions and things introduced to him, and whether they are inherently good, evil, or in between, and whether it is possible to have one without the other.
Reading order · The Giver Quartet
Full order & progress →- The GiverThis book
8.08.0 / 10 - Gathering Blue
7.47.4 / 10 - Messenger
7.57.5 / 10 - Son
7.77.7 / 10
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmThe GiverIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 3,281 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 96% of the weight and the score stays at 8.0 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.1 | 321 | 10% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 9 | 0% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 3K | 90% |
Frequently asked
What age is The Giver for?
The Giver sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 200 pages — shorter than 93% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.4 and 8.2, closest to this book.
