Apologies for the delay in creating a new post. A virus carried by the World Wide Web led everyone in my town to believe that they were howler monkeys; meanwhile, poison in the rivers made all our toes fall off and left us vulnerable to takeover by a rogue group of terrorists who had made housecats into an army of darkness.
Or I got lazy. You pick.
In either case, I promised a review of Lois Lowry's Son, and I am here to deliver. It's been a month or so since I finished it, but I doubt it has changed much since then.
It began in the Community made famous by her earlier novel, The Giver. Taking the perspective of a young girl assigned to be Birth Mother, it began by leading readers through the Community's systematic process of creating new human life. Mother and child were separated, as is the custom in the Community. Atypically, though, the mother couldn't seem to forget the child she had brought into the world. She found the boy in the Nurturing Center and forged a connection with him, which led to her following him out of the Community when he...
OK, no spoilers. Suffice it to say that she followed him into danger and spent a very, very long time trying to re-connect with him.
The lingering question is, is it a fitting sequel to The Giver - perhaps one of the first dystopian novels in modern YA fiction? Does it do the series justice?
At first.
The first third of the book is truly compelling. We look through the eyes of a teenage girl assigned to the "job" of being pregnant and then delivering a baby, then continue on with her as she tries to forget the strongest bond known to humankind. The Community is just as disturbingly sanitary as it was in The Giver, and the people just as unconsciously restless and unfulfilled.
But after the main character leaves the Community, things get weird. Supernatural events start to happen; mystical personages appear and alter things with magic spells and the like. And to be honest, I felt a bit betrayed. I had picked up a dystopian novel set in an altered society that I could believe was probable, given certain developments in human history. Then Lowry changed the rules, and I was in a fantasy world or on some alien planet. I wasn't sure, and I hadn't signed on for this.
Don't get me wrong; I love fantasy and sci-fi. But I also like to know what to expect, and this wasn't it. I felt like the social constructs of the Community were no longer a commentary on our own, but a made-up world I couldn't relate to. I wasn't sure what was going on, or what she was trying to say, and I can't say that I liked it.
Perhaps if I'd known what was coming, I would have felt better about it. But in all honesty, I wish I'd stopped when mother and baby left the Community. Up until then, it was golden.
