Overreliance on metaphor to express Juliette’s jaw-dropping surprise wears thin: “My mouth is sitting on my kneecaps. Fast-paced action scenes convey imminent danger vividly, but there’s little sense of a broader world here. The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate-Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell. Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. Wrought with admirable skill-the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly provocative novel.Ī dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself. Ill-equipped, Jonas sets out with the baby on a desperate journey whose enigmatic conclusion resonates with allegory: Jonas may be a Christ figure, but the contrasts here with Christian symbols are also intriguing. Horrified, Jonas plots escape to 'Elsewhere,' a step he believes will return the memories to all the people, but his timing is upset by a decision to release a newchild he has come to love. The process is deeply disturbing for the first time, Jonas learns about ordinary things like color, the sun, snow, and mountains, as well as love, war, and death: the ceremony known as 'release' is revealed to be murder. In the event, he is named 'Receiver,' to replace an Elder with a unique function: holding the community's memories-painful, troubling, or prone to lead (like love) to disorder the Elder ('The Giver') now begins to transfer these memories to Jonas. Father, a 'Nurturer,' cares for 'newchildren' Mother works in the 'Department of Justice' but Jonas's admitted talents suggest no particular calling. In a radical departure from her realistic fiction and comic chronicles of Anastasia, Lowry creates a chilling, tightly controlled future society where all controversy, pain, and choice have been expunged, each childhood year has its privileges and responsibilities, and family members are selected for compatibility.Īs Jonas approaches the 'Ceremony of Twelve,' he wonders what his adult 'Assignment' will be.

Kissing the witch by emma donoghue