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I've had a really hard time with this series. I read the Giver as a teen, loved it, have thought of it often, and one of my first acts when the internet really became a resource for knowledge was looking up to see if Lowry had ever said whether or not Gabe and Jonas made it, or just died of hypothermia. I remember vividly that the interview said that she left it ambiguous on purpose so the reader could decide.

Years pass and then suddenly I discovered that The Giver was now part of a trilogy. I read the other two books, discovered that Jonas and Gabe did make it, and then at Costco last week found this 'conclusion' to their tale.

For some reason these three additional stories cheapen the original for me. It feels like an attempt to capitalize on the dystopian and series novel trend. The series begins to feel like it pulls too heavily from Harry Potter and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Evil incarnate and biblical themes (particularly in Messenger). Following on from the sacrificed son in Messenger, the battle Gabe wages against the Trademaster again confuses me. Is this the second coming if we're going with a biblical allegory and evil is finally dealt with once and for all? Or was the allegory limited to Messenger and we're now just in the realm of fiction again?

Gabe's fight with the Trademaster seems to come out of nowhere--when Jonas calls him to the fight it is too sudden and without enough explanation for me. How does he know that fighting the Trademaster will bring back his mom, and why is Jonas (or Claire for that matter) willing to let that happen? Jonas's limited relationship with Gabe after their relocation to this new settlement is another source of deep disappointment to me--they just don't have the brother relationship I had expected or hoped for. Jonas left his family and community for Gabe...and then basically gave him up when they came to the new community? And now is all for throwing him into a one-on-one battle with the devil with no clear sense of why Jonas feels that it should be Gabe. Jonas as a character is just too vague for me after The Giver. Like a tired old man shell of a character...but in his 20s.

Other disappointments include the fact that we didn't get to see what happened in the community after Jonas left and the memories all flooded back to the citizens. I was really hoping we'd get to see that through Claire (it's another one of those things that captured my imagination) but instead all we get is that there was confusion.

Now that I'm done complaining I will say that I did enjoy Son. I was always eager to read what happened next and enjoyed reading about her time in the intermediate settlement, even though it wasn't directly answering the bigger storyline. I think I just felt a sense of disappointment that the three books that followed from The Giver didn't feel like part of the original thought behind that world, but a business decision tapping into some current trends.