🍷 Flavour Profile
Primary Notes: Dominant notes of sweetened safety, undercut by bitter trade-offs
Secondary Notes: Undertones of sanitised feeling
Tertiary Notes: Faint glimmers of bleeding colour
📜 Provenance
🍽️ Medium: Book | Pages: 225
👤 By: Lois Lowry
📍 Where I Found It: Ethan, my partner, recommended it to me
🍷 Tasting Notes
It was a cold, rainy Friday evening in Queens — the start of a long Memorial Day weekend. A hot shower behind me, a warm bedside lamp, and an ice-cold Mango White Claw, I curled up with my copy of The Giver by Lois Lowry.
The world I entered immediately struck me as dystopian but organised. It felt less like a post-apocalyptic wasteland and more like a society governed by different rules. The people are happy, they are sad, they are apprehensive — it all seems normal enough, save for the unfamiliar traditions, the renamed things, and the hyper-fixation on precise language. When a teacher corrects Asher, or Jonas’s parents correct him for using “extreme” words — there is nothing cruel about the scenes. There is no apparent big bad, no malice on the surface, and yet, a certain je ne sais quoi sits unnervingly in the subtext. The more the world builds, the more you notice the strong aversion to exaggeration as a sort of quiet policing of feeling. You then begin to suspect that this is the first hairline crack in a seemingly pleasant utopia.
The pacing is masterful. Nothing is ever rushed or dragged, and revelations arrive exactly on time. Jonas is a young boy, newly twelve, and has been chosen by his community to be the new Receiver of Memory. He begins his training with the Giver, the previous Receiver. Among the instructions he is handed is a startling one: he may now lie. Seemingly unassuming, it lands as a threshold — and what makes it land is the question it plants in Jonas’s mind: whether every adult was given the same licence, and if so, whom he can still trust.
It would have been too easy for this story to fall into the trap of “community bad, Jonas good.” Yet, Lowry offers us something much deeper. Through this expertly spun bildungsroman, we explore epistemology. How do we know things? Is everything we know taught to us? As the Giver transmits memories of the world — the past, before the Sameness the community now lives under — we find ourselves reacquainted with the instinctiveness of certain kinds of knowledge.
There is a perfect moment when Jonas arrives at the Giver’s residence for training one minute late. He explains his tardiness: riding over on his bike with his friend Fiona, he had noticed something about her hair change, just for an instant. The same thing had happened with an apple he was tossing with a friend — a fleeting something he could not articulate. The Giver tests a theory, and then reveals that what Jonas has been glimpsing is the colour red. This, to me, was one of the most brilliant twists in the book. Up until that point — if you were anything like me — you had imagined the whole world in colour. In an instant, the scene makes you realise that everything the characters have been experiencing is black and white. And while the reveal works in its own right, what you do not yet know is that it will become a load-bearing cornerstone of the book’s message.
The emotional centre of the book lies in the bargains we are forced to make. The community has secured real and valuable things — safety, comfort, no hunger, no war, no pain. However, these were secured at the cost of choice, colour, love, and the rich depths of the human experience. The story and the author never pretend the trade-off is one-sided, and never obviously advocate for one over the other. That is something the reader is allowed to discover for themselves. A testament to good young adult writing is when the author takes their young readers seriously, and Lowry does exactly that. In a book preoccupied with choice, she extends the same freedom to us — she never tells us whether the trade-off was worth it. We get to choose.
As I hungrily made my way through the pages, I found myself thinking about when I was newly twelve. I remember how much I yearned to leave home, to move abroad, to live larger than life. I was convinced of all the wonderful things I would do, the people I would meet, the experiences I would have, the things I would see. I craved the fullness of life. Sixteen years later, I have done and seen and lived things I could never have imagined. Having lived in London, and spent extended time in New York, I found myself at the epicentres of the creative explosions of the human spirit. Yet the beautifully tragic duality is that it comes almost exclusively alongside missed birthdays, lost friends, grandparents falling sick half a world away, and the family you once lived with now seen a handful of times a year. It was everything I ever dreamed it would be. It just wasn’t free. I suppose a full life is full because of the cost, not in spite of it.
Snapping back into the final chapter, I read it again. Jonas has fled the community with Gabriel, and as the cold and hunger and the long dark wear on him, he finally crests a hill. Somewhere along that arduous way, frozen and starving, he finds himself questioning whether he should ever have left at all. Then, in the final lines, Jonas hears what he knows to be music — the life he was working toward, calling him. Surprisingly, he thinks he hears music from behind him too, across the vast distances of space and time he had left — and the line “but perhaps it was only an echo” nods straight back to the heart of the book. Because even if what reached him sounded like music, even if it felt like happiness, it was only ever a shell of the life he was riding toward.
There was something about this last chapter that made me read it a few times over, and each time it tugged at the optimist in me. I wonder if what that last paragraph was saying is that what was portrayed as catastrophe for the community — the reason the Giver stayed behind, to help them carry the memories as they returned — was not, in the end, as terrible as they feared. With the pain came everything else. And there was so much else. There was so much good.
✨ The Finish
🕯️ What Stayed: “For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.”
💬 If you asked me: This is a phenomenal read because of how disarmingly it uses simplicity of language to tackle complex themes of free will, individuality, and the full cost of a full life.
🏷️ Vintage
Published: 1993 | Read: May 22-23, 2026
📝 Footnotes:
Where to Find the Book: The Giver – Lois Lowry
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The Big Smokey Apple 