The term “Young Adult” has taken on a new meaning since these dark times of overdosed dystopias, pale sparkling men and tattooed, leather clad teens. There was more “Adult” to the genre; we grew wiser from stories, as opposed to being told “Killing Children, Bad!” or “Sexy Abusive Vampire, Good!”
I remember attending middle school in the early 2000’s as a time where we read books like Ender’s Game, Animal Farm and The Giver. They were readings for school, sure, but they had a relevance to them. The Orwellian predictions of these novels were becoming realized, right in our faces, or advancing to even scarier territory, and even as “Young Adults” we mostly recognized this. Now that we live in the age of oversaturated media and customizable internet experiences, ‘The Community,’ as presented in Lois Lowry’s 1994 Newbery Medal winning novel, couldn’t feel more real to children.
Lowry, herself, recognizes the impact “The Giver” has made on two decades worth of readers, young and old, and acknowledges that the story is harder to translate than the likes of the action packed “Hunger Games” franchise.
You can go read her thoughts in the new foreword for “The Giver” currently being featured on The Huffington Post.
My disappointment in “The Giver’s” first trailer was not unlike the rest of the internet. For readers of books such as this, particularly the one that is all about controlled perception, it is hard to get a massive audience on board with a single vision when everyone has it perceived in a way unique to their own imagination.
That being said, the new character posters seem to convey the book’s themes much more accurately. Namely, the contrast in how color is perceived…
Do you think this adaptation will connect with audiences in the way the book did? Or will it be a flash in a pan like all the other attempts at adapting “Young Adult” novels since the Twilight Invasion? (Don’t tell me you forgot about last year’s disastrous Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, did you?)
“The Giver,” starring Jeff Bridges, Brenton Thwaites, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Alexander Skarsgard, Cameron Monaghan, Odeya Rush, and Taylor Swift, will be in theaters everywhere August 15th
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Official Synopsis:
The haunting story of THE GIVER centers on Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), a young man who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Yet as he begins to spend time with The Giver (Jeff Bridges), who is the sole keeper of all the community’s memories, Jonas quickly begins to discover the dark and deadly truths of his community’s secret past. With this newfound power of knowledge, he realizes that the stakes are higher than imagined – a matter of life and death for himself and those he loves most. At extreme odds, Jonas knows that he must escape their world to protect them all – a challenge that no one has ever succeeded at before. THE GIVER is based on Lois Lowry’s beloved young adult novel of the same name, which was the winner the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.
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