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Summary Of ' The Giver ' Essay

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Lord, Elyse. "Overview of The Giver." Novels for Students. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Mar. 2016. Elyse Lord is one of the many critics who describe “The Giver” as terrifying but offering “hope and a constructive view” of the Utopian world in the book. She explains that other critics praise the book with many awards such as the Newberry Medal. Lord goes on to reason that the story is favored by different readers for its complexity, symbolism, metaphors, ambiguous ending, and can be compared similarly to classic science fiction like “Brave New World” and “Fahrenheit 451.” Contradicting this statement, Lord says that ‘librarians’, ‘educators’, and ‘students’ debate “The Giver” to be censored from public schools around the world because of its graphic scenes and ideas of infanticide and euthanasia. This includes the time Jonas witnessed his father murder a baby and throw it down a trash chute in cold blood. This is ironical compared to the language, emotion, and behaviors being censored in Jonas’s ‘Utopian’ society. Lord argues this through Anna Cerbasi of Port Saint Lucie, Florida, who asked the school board to remove a book that was about a family murdering their child for crying at night and called the book inappropriate for the sixth grade. Lord raises the question of who is to “decide which books are appropriate for which children,” and argues that it cannot be answered with not one but the many books integrated in school curricula that compose

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