ACReads

Now, I need to give a word of caution to those of you who are interested in reading Son. Son is not a sequel to The Giver. To fully understand the story, you need to have read at the very least Messenger. After finishing Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley, I was in a wee reading slump and decided to pick up Son, excited to see what happened to Jonas and the baby, Gabriel (and at this point, I had not read Gathering Blue or Messenger). For the most part, I could follow what was happening... Claire's story follows the same timeline as in The Giver... it was interesting to see a different aspect of the infamous Community. But Claire's struggle is to connect with her son and because I am not a mother myself, I was not able to really sympathize with her situation. Perhaps when I have a child, I will appreciate her more but for the most part, I was bored with her character.

So, everything was going okay... until about 3/4 of the way into the story... when Lowry introduces Trade Master. Trade Master? Who the heck is this guy? I had no idea who this man was and couldn't believe that Lowry was introducing an antagonist this late in the game. Little did I know that Trade Master played a roll in Messenger... But because I had no earlier introduction to Trade Master, I didn't really care about the conflict that he presented and I didn't understand the enormity of the task set before the Villagers. For most of the time, I felt like I was flipping pages to get through the story. Yeah, Son was alright... but it just wasn't the same reading experience for me as The Giver.