For instance, in one school, the girls might wear their socks artfully scrunched down. That made her hypervigilant about recognizing subtle differences between the rules of each new place. 'So I would be thrust into classrooms as the new kid,' she explains. As the child of an Army officer, Lowry moved all over the globe - often after the school year had started. Instead, she says, it was just a story like so many of her other ones, about a kid making sense of a complicated world. 'I didn't think of it as futuristic or dystopian or science fiction or fantasy,' she protests. Some critics credit The Giver with kicking off the entire dystopian YA trend, but Lowry immediately dismisses the notion. Suddenly, a dystopian fantasy with a built-in following of millions of readers seemed like a worthy risk. Jonas, played by Brenton Thwaites, is assigned to learn the painful history of humanity in Lowis Lowry's The Giver.īut then came The Hunger Games. Like so many who've suffered the pain of losing someone, Lowry considered - just passingly - how much better our existences might be if we didn't have memories at all. 'And he said, 'Whatever happened to her?' And I had to tell him about her death.' 'And he said, 'I can't remember her name,' and I told him her name,' she says. One day, she showed her father a photo of her sister, who died at the age of 28. 'He didn't have Alzheimer's, but he began to lose pieces of his memory, the way people do as they age,' she recalls. Lowry came up with the idea of a scary, sterile world where nearly everyone takes drugs to suppress their memories and emotions after her father was put in a nursing home. It's assigned reading in thousands of schools. The Giver swept up nearly every prestigious prize for young adult literature, including the Newbery Medal and the William Allen White Award. The movie adaptation opened this week and stars Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges. Refreshing, right? But it's also a world without memory, at least in the premise of Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver.

Just for a second, imagine a world without war, conflict or grief.

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