The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver by Lois Lowry made such a strong impression on me that I can say it is the best novel I have read in long time. It reminded me of  Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  In both novels, "Brave New World"  and " The Giver" most of the population  lives according to community's dystopian rules foregoing individual pursuits for the community's gain, submitting to government surveillance, and substituting  group mentality for intellectual inquiry.  The novel surely makes one think about the rules our societies are governed, the unwritten rules we all abide by and hardly question them.  The speaker in the novel that gives announcements I would compare with public media in our world. A lot of our opinion on certain events is formed by public media. And even in best democracies media can be governed in certain direction to suit the interests of the corporations. One just wonders how it would be to live in such  society. It was certainly intriguing to discover as I moved forward trough the pages all sorts of unusual rules. Some of the most striking were that  people were not allowed to read books. Society favors sameness and sitting and reading books encourages people to draw too deeply into themselves rather than participate in activities that help the community or strengthen social bonds between members of community.

Giver's society is deprived of pain, passion and true love.  For elite classes of society it is allowed to ignore the rules, preferring the artifacts of culture they left behind to the amusement of society they govern and maintain.  Great works of art, often inspired by passion, pain, suffering, and other  disorderly influences are always powerful and relevant even in societies that claim to have gotten rid of passion and pain.
The end of the novel is ambiguous. We are not certain what happened to the main character.  There could be two possibilities. Either he found the happy Elsewhere with people who are free to make choices and living as in his memories or he and Gabriel froze to death.  I would definitely love to see some sort of sequence to this story.
I believe this story develops imagination and creativity of thinking of children. It may be little bit difficult to grasp for Elementary school children.  The classroom would definitely need some sort of my introduction to this story, explanation of basic terminology author uses. We would definitely reflect on rules and functioning of our own society and compare to the one in " The Giver"
After reading this novel I am very eager to read all of Lois Lowry novels. The whole world of beloved science fiction awakens in me.