Recalling literary heroes like Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna and James with his giant peach, the Willoughbys concoct a diabolical plan to turn themselves into worthy and winsome orphans.
A powerful story set in Nazi occupied Denmark in 1943. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen is called upon for a selfless act of bravery to help save her best-friend, Ellen -- a Jew.
It is a world without conflict, poverty and inequality. Conformity and happiness are a way of life. But for Jonas, things are different. While his friends are selected to be doctors or teachers, Jonas is sent to the Giver where he discovers the secrets that lie beneath the surface of his world.
Jonas, the protagonist in Lois Lowry's novel The Giver , lives in what appears to be a safe, predictable, familiar community. Members of this utopia, which is void of disease, hunger, poverty, war, or lasting pain, have given up all emotions and memories of experience to attain Sameness and the illusion of social order.
Shouldn't we be orphans? one of the Willoughby children suggests one day. The four are, after all, part of an old-fashioned kind of family, and their parents -- well, their parents are not all that one would hope for.