Son by Lois Lowry

[katekintailbc]

Son
by Lois Lowry
(Audio)

When I saw Lois Lowry at the National Book Festival (September 2012, my second time seeing her there) she talked about this book, the fourth (and final?!) book in the Giver series. The story deals with Claire, the mother of Gabe, the little boy Jonas kidnapped aka rescued in The Giver. Because she went off her meds for her pregnancy and wasn't told to go back on again, she ended up developing emotions and a desire to want to connect with her son. Claire gets to know him as a baby, though no one know she's his mother. And when Jonas takes him away, Claire sets out to go find him.

She ends up in a little village of nice people, a place she could be happy for the remainder of her life. However, her son isn't there. So she sets out to climb to him over a mountain and find the Trade Master who will help her find her son. It's an understandable tale of perseverance and love, however, it's also kind of slow. Yes, you need that journey to realize what she goes through to get him, but all the training and details of her getting up the mountain made me zone out a few times. Really, the story didn't pick up for me until she finds Trade Master and ends up in the village where Gabe is.

I didn't love some of the more supernatural aspects in Messenger (the third book) and this relies heavily on those aspects. Trade Master is, frankly, a mean bastard. Maybe it's that he has a gift he exploits for his own reasons, hurting everyone in the process, but that's all there is to him; a very flat villain you have to hate. The deal Claire makes with him is that she gets to see her son, but she has to give up her youth. She arrives as an old woman and doesn't want Gabe to know that his mother is some unnaturally old woman (for some reason I never really bought into). The truth finally comes out when she's on her deathbed and Gabe, with his gift of veering, has to go out and vanquish Trade Master in order to save her. I feel like THAT is the journey that would have been more interesting to see in detail... but instead it's rather quick.

Yes, the book is about Claire's bond with Gabe, not Gabe's story, but Gabe's journey was more interesting to me because that's where the action and cleverness came in. It was great to see him want to save his mother and to see things work out as you knew they would at the beginning of the book. But this book definitely didn't have the same sort of magic that the first book in the series did. I read it to to complete the series and found some of the things like what happens to Jonas and Kira not that necessary to me. In all, it's a fair/good book and I'm glad to have finished the series.