Darul lui Jonas by
Lois Lowry
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
People have expectations. This is natural in our world, where life rarely gives you anything if you don't ask for it. This book is very controversial, with opinions going from overrated crap to brilliantly life-changing story. I'm not joining any camp, but I do place it in the 4 star range, mainly because it left me with a very good feeling of trust in our power of changing the world we live in.
This was not meant to be a huge literary masterpiece and it was from the beginning and not just accidentally destined to children. The language is simple and clean, the story it not overly 'written' maybe because our younger readers don't need so many explanations...they just see the magic where it happens. Therefore let's imagine we live in a world where not everything needs to be perfect in order to be beautiful.
I've always loved the idea of pain as a necessary part of life and Lois Lowry manages to create a vivid world starting from the absence of it. And in the end we must agree that a perfect world can't exclude the negatives without loosing the beauty of life. Maybe positives and negatives are not simply two sides of a coin...what we get to live is much more complex.
It is said that any story is just as good as its fist and its last paragraph...and Oh my God! What an ending!? So many possibilities! Our mind is the only limit.
Gathering Blue by
Lois Lowry
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
When I started reading it I expected disappointment because of all the bad reviews out there and because most sequels don't live up to the first book in the series. However disappointment never came. This is a beautiful story, different but very much the same with The Giver. Reading it, I was left with a nice feeling of beauty being able to grow even in the most dark places. And who doesn't appreciate and admire a flower growing up in mud!?
Messenger by
Lois Lowry
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
Lois Lowry...you either hate her or love her, there's no halfway there.
A story about the evil constantly trying to conquer our lives, the things that we are willing to trade in order to own stuff we don't need or to be loved by people who don't deserve us and the price we eventually must pay for all of these.
I loved the magical atmosphere, the way the plot develops into a totally different type of story where familiar characters meet to connect the two previous stories in the series with this one. As in the other two books the finale is abrupt but it is exactly what you need in a world where stories are infinite and endless.
Son by
Lois Lowry
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
If you start reading the series it's totally worth reading it all the way to the fourth book, mainly because otherwise you lose so much of the overall meaning of the story.
”Son” was not my favorite book of the series, but I did appreciate the extra explanations on notions and characters that were somehow left in the air in the other ones. I understand the fact that most people expect closure when it comes to the end of a series and some experienced a kind of frustration because the books don't offer enough information.
As for myself I didn't feel the need for extra explanations because from the beginning I imagined the whole story created by Lowry as being just a small corner of a very diverse fictional world that can never be totally comprised in a book. It's just like fairy-tales where you only get to hear one small story of some prince saving his princess even if let's be honest probably that's far from being the only or the most important thing happening in their world.
Small stories happening in big worlds, having no obvious beginnings or ends and being somehow blurry at the middle, are just like the perfect photo that randomly catches your eye on the internet. You look at it and you wish you could understand better the circumstances surrounding it but probably if you did, it would lose its appeal.
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