I love The Giver. I count it as one of my favorite books of all time. It was the book that inspired me to read and made me want to write. And I should have stopped at The Giver. My ratings of the books in the series have gotten progressively worse. I liked Gathering Blue, wish I didn't read The Messenger, and now wish I could take back time with The Son. I spent money on it, and I want it back. Sort of. I do love Lois Lowry.But this is a great example of how to set rules and not break them. The Giver's rules were a little bit out of the ordinary, a little bit fantasy. That does not mean that suddenly, at the end of the series, you get a personification of evil that gambles and deals like the devil. No. No. Noooooo. Where the hell did this come from? Your guess is as good as mine, because I have no idea. Then the ending. I don't get it. The moral was fight evil? Okay...that's...no justification for how long this book was. She's training for the cliff! Has she gone up the cliff yet? Nope. Still training. ON THE CLIFF! Still on the cliff. Are we going to get off this cliff?And then you meet the Devil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Which, I don't get why if you stand up to Evil, it still wins. Apparently you have to be super special and either Jonas or Gabriel and then, and only then!, will evil be swayed by you. But seriously. That entire book just so we can fight a personification of evil?I feel cheated because there was no point to this. It didn't add anything to the arc. It gave a moral that I realized at five. One star and a desperately plea for Target to give me my money back.

2.5 starsI'm done. I'm so done right now.This one dragggggged. The answers we've been waiting for since book 1 were never truly given and we were forced to watch (yet another) set of side characters become the mains. This time we follow Claire - a birth mother from Jonas's original city. Much like Jonas, she doesn't take the emotion-suppressing pills and thus develops the ability to love. And she loves her son fiercely. She would die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son.As we know from the first book, Gabe was going to be "let go" (aka killed) because he was too fussy of a baby (thus no parents would want to handle him) when Jonas steals him away. Claire frantically searches from her son, eventually climbing onto a nearby barge to get away from her monstrous city. A storm rolls in and the last thing she remembers is looking for...something.This whole book felt incredibly convenient. Claire just happens to wash aboard a small town at the bottom of cliffs. She happens to lose her memory and by the time she gets it back, the only way out of the town just happens to be climbing that sheer cliffs. She just happens to have to spend the next 8 or so years training her body to climb out.Conveniently, during that time Gabe is growing and by the time she gets to him, he's old enough to make other things in the plot happen. This felt like huge a time waste.We never got to figure out who the Trader was, where all these magic powers come and why the society is so messed up. At least...we find out what happened to the characters from book 1...kind of. Thank goodness this series is over.Audiobook CommentsRead by Bernadette Dunne and she did a really fabulous job. I wasn't a fan of the plot but I certainly enjoyed the audio.Blog | Instagram

I love the Giver. So when I heard that Lowry had written a sequel after all this time, I was beyond thrilled. For Son, I love the main character, Claire. She is beautiful, sweet, kind, and has a depth to her that I feel is missing in most female heroines/protagonists today. The underlying drive and theme is also noble-- love as expressed through a mother searching for her lost son. Is there anything more important? Lowry has a wonderful way of offering up themes that need to be considered and discussed, and doing it without flash, without titillation, without sentimentality, but instead through very human characters and universal deep longings that we recognize and understand.Reuniting with characters from The Giver, Gathering Blue, and Messenger, and to see how their lives had turned out 15 years later, was fun. It was satisfying as a fan to see her weave stories and characters from the past books together in new ways here. But in the end, I was left unmoved. The ending left something to be desired. Or perhaps I just love The Giver too much. I'm not sure. But Son is definitely a must-read for anyone who loves the world Lois Lowry created with The Giver.

½Son is the fourth and final installment in Lois Lowry's young adult, dystopian series titled The Giver Quartet. I enjoyed seeing how all the books in this series finally tied together. I was definitely wondering for a while why the series was set up the way it was, but it all came together in the end. Overall, I liked this book and I enjoyed the series as a whole. It's doesn't make my favorites list but that's just personal preference. If you enjoy young adult, dystopian novels then I would recommend this series...if only to read the stories that gave birth to the dystopian trend that is among us today. My favorite quote:Fear dims when you learn things.

Son opens with a captivating scene of a girl, referred to by her watchers as a Vessel, being blindfolded before the process begins. The process is birth and the girl is Claire, a first-time Birthmother. She has been told little about the process, but becomes even more confused as things get complicated and the product (the baby) has to be surgically removed. After the process Claire is reassigned, but she cant stop thinking about her baby. She finds a way into the Nurturing Centre, where all the babies are kept until ready to be assigned to family units. Claire finds her child and from that moment forward her live changes.Her child, of course, is Gabe, the baby who comes to live with Jonas family in The Giver.The book is divided into three distinct parts. Part one happens simultaneously as The Giver, only we are experiencing the story through the very limited and unaware perspective of Gabes mother, Claire. Part two takes place in another community, where Claire struggles to regain both memory and strength before she is able to continue to search for her son. Part three takes place some years later in a third community that has achieved relative peace, with the exception of a dark force known as The Tradesman who stands between Claire and her son.Each section felt like a complete novella. The middle section reminded me of classic historical fiction that takes place in fishing villages or small hunter-gather communities. It is here we meet my favourite character, Einar. He is the strong, silent type, crippled from a meeting with The Tradesman (a truly horrific and frightening creature). Einar is a gentle soul who trains Claire for her dangerous climb out of the village. Their love story is unusual and unrequited and beautifully rendered.Like many other final books in series, Son dips into philosophical waters and Lowry makes eloquent statements about desire versus love, service versus sacrifice, and destiny. This often divides readers. Some people get caught up in the concept, story, and world-building of the first book in a series and are unsettled when the final book rocks the boat in terms of spirituality or social commentary. (Think of The Amber Spyglass, Mockingjay, and to some extent, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows). Fortunately, Lowrys great strength is her subtlety. The book is simultaneously sophisticated and accessible. Like a well-written fable, it appeals to all readers, regardless of age, though I do think some of the themes will resonate more deeply with readers who have read the previous books in the series and are in that 11+ range. The whole book is a great display of craftsmanship, but some paragraphs (the final one in particular) moved me to tears. Her language is full-bodied: rounded, sharp, salty. I would love to have this book read aloud to me.