Finished: Son (Lowry). A book I couldn't put down! The sequel to The Giver. A good book. :-) The Giver is one of the many books I have read this past year, and one that my daughter had read years ago in middle school. In between The Giver and Son, Lowry wrote two more books that involve some of the same characters and the same "world" as The Giver. The Son, however, is a much welcomed follow up to the two characters who escaped with their lives in The Giver....Jonas and baby Gabe. The Son is the story of Claire...the little girl who was assigned as a birthmother in Jonas' very own community. As a matter of fact, she turns out to be baby Gabe's mother! The first part of the book takes you back to the community and the time that Gabe was a newborn...all from Claire's perspective! Gabe's birth is a difficult one and they have to end up doing a C-section on Claire. After that, she is "uncertified" to be a birthmother again and is assigned to another area. The people in charge forget to give Claire the secret pills that the whole community takes from the time they start having "feelings". This oversight allows Claire to feel all the emotions that one would feel after having a baby and having it taken away to the Nurturing Center to then be assigned to the exact right parents...as was the practice in The Giver.

Claire longs to see the baby she birthed and actually volunteers at the Nurturing Center and befriends Jonas' father. Jonas' father works as a nurturer in The Giver and volunteers to take the difficult baby, Gabe, home with him to his family every night because his crying is too disruptive to the other children. Due to his problematic disposition, Gabe isn't assigned to parents. Instead, he is given one more year to clean up his baby attitude. During this whole time Jonas' dad takes Gabe home each night and, of course, Jonas gets attached to the little boy with the blue eyes who he feels may have special powers, just like him. Meanwhile, Claire gets attached to him as well as she spends the year getting to know him, and Gabe her. When the year passes and Gabe is still a hard to handle baby the decision is made by the people in charge that he will never be assigned and must "go away". Jonas' father doesn't exactly tell Claire this, but he does tell her that she should say goodbye to Gabe...that he's not going to be assigned. In The Giver, Jonas figures out that this means Gabe will be killed, and so Jonas takes him and runs away with him to a new land. Just as Jonas and Gabe are about to succumb to the winter elements and die, they come upon a village. This marks the ending of The Giver, and you are left thinking surely they made it to the village!

Meanwhile, from Claire's point of view you see the community lock down and the alarms sounding as something is terribly amiss. She runs into Jonas' father and all he says is "Jonas took him". Claire ends up on a supply boat that docks at the community every so often and the next we see of her she has been in a shipwreck and is battered and washed ashore at a rural coastal community that is surrounded by unscalable cliffs. The community has no electricity and no formal education, but the people take in "Water Claire" as they call her and try to help her regain her memory. She has no memory of where she came from, or of having given birth. Claire is taken in and cared for as a daughter for several  years by the village healer. She attends a childbirth with the healer, and her whole ordeal of giving birth to Gabe comes back to her. She remembers that she has a son and longs to find him. Many of the villagers shun her because she had a child so young and out of wedlock...but the village sheep tender, Einar, a young man about Claire's age, falls in love with her. He is horribly crippled because he had tried several years ago to escape the village by climbing the treacherous cliffs. Claire begs him to help her climb the cliffs to escape and find her son. Einar trains Claire physically and mentally for six years before he feels she ready to make the attempt. He also warns her that once she reaches the top, she will face her gravest danger....an evil man known as the Trademaster. The Trademaster will be able to grant her a trade to find her son, but he will want something essential in return. Einar had refused his trade offer when he reached the top years ago, and the Trademaster mutilated his feet and forced him back down the cliff. Einar tells Claire she must say yes to whatever the Trademaster asks if she wants to continue on and find her son.

So...of course....Claire encounters the evil Trademaster and what he wants in return for letting Claire continue on her journey and leading her to her son is....her youth! Claire says yes, and immediately becomes a frail old woman. Apparently the Trademaster is a significant character in the third book of the series, The Messenger. He was responsible for bringing evil and horrible ways to the people of the village that Jonas and Gabe settle in. In the next part of Son we see the teenage Gabe. He has noticed the old woman who watches him from afar for several years now. She came to the village and was accepted as part of the community. We also see Jonas, who has married Kira (the main character of Gathering Blue, the second book in the series). They have two toddlers and are happy in the village. Though Gabe is kind of like a son to Jonas, apparently Gabe has grown up in the Home for Boys in the village, along with the other orphaned children from various communities. Gabe spends most of his time building a boat because he longs more than anything to set out back to the mysterious community that Jonas won't tell him much about and find his mother. Little does he know that his mother is right there, watching him from afar...but afraid to tell him who she is because she's become a frail, old woman. Jonas senses that there is something benevolent that is surrounding Gabe...but he also feels a disturbing force as well. Claire discovers that she does not have long to live so she finally decides to talk to Jonas and let him know who she is. They had seen each other very briefly in The Giver. She relates her entire story to Jonas, and he's overwhelmed at seeing someone from where they grew up, and more overwhelmed that the Trademaster took her youth. As Claire falls extremely ill that night, and grows close to death, Jonas tells Gabe that Claire is his mother. Gabe refuses to believe him at first...but then Jonas tells Gabe about the Trademaster and how Gabe is the only one who can go and settle things. They realize that if Gabe can defeat the Trademaster, that the trade can be reversed and perhaps Claire can come back to him as his mother...as long as he's not too late! Gabe faces off with the Trademaster in a pretty anticlimactic few pages and it simply becomes a battle of good versus evil. Of course, good wins out and the Trademaster dissolves into a little clump. Meanwhile, Claire reverts back to her 30-year old self and goes out the door of the cottage where she laid dying the night before to meet her son coming down the path. The end. :-)

I know these books were written for middle school aged children, but I've enjoyed the two I read! Now...do I want to read the two in between books???