What Is It About Lois Lowry's Books That Invokes Such Love and Devotion from Her Young Readers?
October 04, 2012
What is it about Lois Lowry's books that invokes such love and devotion from her young readers? One journalist for The New York Times suggests that it comes from Lowry's ability to "actually listen to children."
"[Lowry] was asked to deliver the eighth-grade commencement speech at her local middle school in Maine. She was preceded to the lectern by the principal, who told the bored, uncomfortable kids that these were their golden years. When Lowry spoke, she told them the principal was misleading them. These weren’t their golden years at all. At best they were a dull beige. She reminisced about her own eighth-grade year, when she was obsessed with a girl in her class who had enormous breasts when Lowry had none. The kids laughed. But when Lowry looked out at the parents, she later wrote, 'their faces were like concrete.' She realized that day that she could talk to kids or she could talk to adults, but not to both: 'And so I chose the kids.'"
The Giver has sold millions of copies around the world and won the 1994 Newbery Medal. Despite yearly challenges and bans since its 1993 publication, educators regularly incorporate the book in their teaching curriculum. Many credit The Giver and its subsequent titles, Gathering Blue, The Messenger and now Son, as the launch pads for other popular speculative/dystopian fiction books such as Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy and Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy.