Son

Here's the third sequel to The Giver, the fourth and final book in what can loosely be called a series. This is the longest book of the four, coming in at 393 pages. (It's also the shortest book I've read yet this year, and for a little while I flirted with the idea of making 2016 a 500+ page-only year. #BigReads! Oh well.)

It's tough to describe Son without just jumping into some plot details, so let's do that. The book is split into three separate and fairly standalone parts - "Before," "Between," and "Beyond."

Before

The book begins with a girl named Claire giving birth to a baby boy. Before long, we realize that this is taking place in the same community as the original Giver book - a world where everyone is given a predefined role and everyone is adopted. One such role is "birthmother," and that's exactly what Claire is. Her son is taken away from her immediately as that's the way things go in this society. Claire spends the rest of "Before" missing her son and longing to get him back somehow - a highly abnormal way for a birthmother to feel. Meanwhile, in the background and on the margins, we learn that the events of The Giver are taking place. Jonas is chosen as the new receiver and he decides to run away from the society in order to save a baby boy that they're planning on executing. That baby boy? Of course - it's Claire's son. So right away, Son establishes a link back to The Giver that neither Gathering Blue nor Messenger ever really did. The first part of the book ends with Claire running after Jonas and her son by stowing away on a ship that crashes and leaves her stranded in a foreign, alien place.

Between

It turns out, the foreign and alien place Claire winds up just looks a lot like what we'd typically recognize as a basic, maybe slightly primitive human society. People have mothers and fathers and deal with death and make their own friends and relationships. It's all very normal stuff. Marissa and Keith both agreed in their posts on Son that this middle portion was just total crap. And I see where they're coming from. It's like the part of The Dark Knight Rises where Batman is just stuck in the big pit, trying to get back his Batman swagger. Claire spends years in this society and is told that she'll have to climb a giant cliff in order to get away from this place and continue to seek out her son. And that's the whole middle chunk of Son - Claire grows stronger and wiser and learns about how people interact. And then she makes that climb, and then she's off to find her son. That's all.

Beyond

I'm down on the ending. I get that Marissa and Keith found the middle third of the story to be boring and unrelated to anything else from the series, but for my money the ending was a complete snoozer. Claire comes across this guy called the Trademaster who tells her where her son is in exchange for her youth. So Claire becomes an old, frail lady (right after working for years to get such a cut cliff-climbing bod, too!) and goes off to find her son. He lives with Jonas in a village where people who've escaped from the various dystopias of The Giver series tend to go. The girl from Gathering Blue lives there and the guy from Messenger is buried there. So, yeah, nice - we've finally linked all these stories. But how does this one conclude? Claire finds Jonas and explains her situation to him, and Jonas decides they've got to defeat the evil Trademaster. But none of them are really very violent, what with all of them being heroes from a children's series. Gabe - that's Claire's son - is like, I dunno, ten years old by now. And Gabe can read minds. And Gabe meets up with the Trademaster, reads his mind, and learns that all he wants to do is cause suffering. And Gabe tells the Trademaster about all these people living happily together in the village, and how they've all overcome the Trademaster's attempts to ruin their lives. And learning of this happiness literally destroys the Trademaster, which makes Claire a young woman again. And presumably they all live happily ever after. Weak, right?