Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

The Giver by Lois Lowry

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Minds I have owned a copy of The Giver for quite a while and it has sat collecting dust on our bookshelf reserved for the classics. My kiddo, on a whim, picked it up and when my 13-year-old picks up something that is a classic, I generally take that as an opportunity to revisit it. (See also, failed attempt to get him to read “A Wrinkle in Time.”) When I picked it up to reread, I soon began to wonder if […]

Familiar and Strange

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

Messenger by Lois Lowry

Son by Lois Lowry

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I was 11 when The Giver was published, and I remember my 7th grade English teacher, the next year, reading it aloud to my class. It was my first exposure to dystopian fiction and I ate it up. Everyone in my class had their own copy so we could follow along, and within a few years my copy was completely dog-eared and tattered, as I read and reread. At some point, having moved on to more sophisticated dystopias as I got older, it ended up […]

Read all four, you’ll be glad you did.

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The Giver was a recent selection for a book club I’m in, and so when I picked up my copy I figured I might as well get the ‘quartet’ edition that also has the other three books that follow: Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son. I don’t read a ton of YA fiction, so these were nice quick palate cleansers after The Devourers. 😉 THE GIVER (Book #1) The world that Jonas lives in is a carefully orchestrated and controlled society. Families are created in labs, […]

Son: A Beautiful End to a Beautiful Quartet

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Having got a late start on The Giver, I decided to make up for lost time by reading the entire quartet. How beautifully wonderful it was! I don’t know what critics or readers think of it, but I thought it was the perfect ending to an original and piercing series. The story begins with a girl named Claire. A disappointing student, she is assigned the role of Birthmother. And then it all goes wrong. She feels things she cannot explain, things that no one else […]



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