The Giver Quartet: Son by Lois Lowry - Series Finished!

Most people I've met read The Giver because it was assigned at some point in Middle School. I've noticed that any book assigned is hard to get through, so a lot of the kids I talked to just sort of rolled their eyes at me. However, a couple of them gushed about how good the book is. One of my coworkers, Amanda, raved about it and immediately recommended the next book in the series Gathering Blue to me. (She seems to have really good taste in literature, by the way, she's also the one that recommended me A Thousand Splendid Suns) However, everyone I talked to seemed to know about The Giver and two of the sequels Gathering Blue and Messenger. Virtually no one seemed to know about the fourth, and last book, Son.

I finished Son in one day. It's a 405 page book. That's fast, even for me. If I had one criticism of the series, it was that the books were only really loosely connected. All of them are great, but the characters from one book to the next, didn't overlap much. The settings, while all within the world Lowry created, were very different. So when I opened Son I expected more of the same loosely connected sort of story. What I absolutely did not expect, was a story that stitched all three of the previous books together.

Amazingly, this didn't feel at all artificial. If anything, I had the sense that Lowry had always intended to wrap it all up like this. It's nice when an ending really feels right.

The best bit for me is, I now have this secret literary weapon. I can just see it:

"Oh, so you really liked The Giver? Have you read the sequels Gathering Blue and Messenger? You have! Have you read Son? That's right kapow there's a fourth book!" The lit ninja strikes again. bwahahahahaha!

That's totally how it's going to go.