I was so excited to find this book in my online library. I didn't even know this was out - and it indeed is a fairly recent release (2012). One book doesn't necessarily lead to the next - but they are all intertwined - and Son seems to be a response to the most probable reader uproar that happened at the end of The Giver when everyone was asking what happened to Jonas and the baby. The answer was given in Gathering Blue and The Messenger sort of - but Son really rounds off the set so perfectly.
The story is broken into three sections - before, in-between, and beyond.
Claire is a Birthmother in the original community that Jonas (the main character in The Giver) was a part of - indeed, we learn a bit later, right at the time he was Selected and subsequently left he community. It is her job to produce three Products. The women's diet, exercise and sleep are regulated. The are inseminated, they are blindfolded when they give birth, and the baby is taken away and brought to the Nurturing Center where they are are raised the first year, and then named and assigned couples. Everything in this community, as the reader has been familiar with is sterile, without deep emotion. People in the community actually take pills - a drug that suppresses feelings - and thus most everyone is content with how things are. During Claire's birth, something goes wrong and she has a C-section (but doesn't understand this), and the baby is well, but Claire cannot continue as a Birthmother - and is reassigned to work in a Fish Hatchery. Amidst this unexpected failure and reassignment, she isn't re-administerd these pills that keep human emotion at bay and she feels the loss of her child, but cannot identify the feelings other than a yearning to find how he is. She learns his number, his name, and that he is having problems sleeping at night ... in fact this is the very baby that Jonas takes with him when he escapes the community.
Claire loses her mind upon realizing the baby had "failed to thrive", and then subsequently was kidnapped from the community. She gets on a boat in attempt to escape and follow Jonas, but the boat shipwrecks into an isolated community on the sea (it reminds of Scotland). She assimilates to the new community (which is much more like those we know, but primitive) and is introduced to concepts such as colors and things such as animals and birds. She is taken in by a single, aging mid-wife, and helps her in her tasks. As her memory returns, she remembers she has a son, and she is determined to escape the community to find him. It isn't the community holding her back, it's the geography. The sea is too dangerous and a huge cliff cuts them off from the world. Claire begins training to scale this wall and escape the community. It takes her several years of training - being led by a young man who had trained himself but injury had kept him from staying.
Claire does indeed scale the wall (it takes an entire day) and at the top she meets the Trademaster. A character that was a part of the last book but not quite as sinister as this one - he offered a trade to the young man who had trained Claire - the young man had refused and so he had chopped off his legs. With Claire, the Trademaster offered to help her find her Son in trade of her youth. Claire had been instructed not to refuse the trade, whatever it was - and she did not refuse so she joined the community that her son was being raised (now 8 years old), but as an old old woman.
The last part of the book picks of the baby's life - Gabriel - who is now a determined teenager building a boat from a picture in an attempt to search out his past, specifically to find his mother. In spite of Jonas telling him that parents were assigned, and there was no such thing as love (sort of a amiability), Gabe feels there was indeed someone who loved him. Gabe has also found he has a gift, much like the characters in the previous books. Before he is about to leave the community in search, his mother reveals herself - having held back up to this point because she felt she would be interfering on his life, and her old age made her unsuitable as a mother - but feeling her end is near, she shares first with Jonas, and then becomes deathly ill. Gabe learns his mother's fate and is instructed he must kill the Trademaster who has grown to this embodiment of evil. Gabe is able to "veer" or experience the actual feelings of other characters. Gabe is just coming to understand how to control this gift and sets off to face the Trademaster, reminiscent as to how Matthew had to fade in the end of Messenger.
What I liked: The community is brilliant - maybe it was taken from Madeleine L'Engle's Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time, but I don't care - it had its own feel, and its own beautiful plot. I liked having the back story filled in. I liked having three parts to the story - and visiting three parts of the world - each community was well built. I especially love them being reunited in the end - I need happy endings in books: evil conquered, love reunited - how life should have been.
What I didn't like: The ending was little bit cheesy. The end of Messenger may have been too - but its dramatic finish was beautiful. This ending - where Gabe veers and learns the Trademaster's weakness: his hunger for human suffering - is a bit quaint he is conquered by showing how love has conquered suffering. I don't think Lois Lowry is a Christian - but her message is - but whereas Matthew's sacrifice was so beautiful symbolic, Gabriel's battle was not subtle at all - and so in turn, kind of boring.
Quotes: "He is Evil ... He tempts. He taunts. And he takes."
Lame quotes: "You won't ever know what that's like, to love someone. In a way, I pity you. But I hope you starve."
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