A dystopian society that masks itself as a utopia in a book shelved in the children's section of your local library. I suppose that's what you'd call this. It's light on violence, shows the world through teenage eyes, and tries to teach a lesson about life and love and...whatever.

The cynical side of me wants to scoff at the lessons imparted in The Giver. Half of me thinks, why not embrace the Sameness, a life without color, without love, without the things that some would argue make life worth living. As someone always on the outside, this seems positive to me. No more mockery. No more heartache. No more pain. No more feeling like there isn't a place for you because genetics and science have ensured that you indeed have a very specific, proscribed place.

And of course the other half of me says, I'm not living in a world where I can't see a blue sky or feel rain fall or taste cold beer.

But who really knows. The Giver is fiction. We can't say what a world of carbon copy individuals with strict time tables would be like. In the book, the main character Jonas is exposed to the truths of the world, given memories of the past by The Giver. His advantage is a knowledge of what's on both sides of the fence. But as readers we don't benefit from a pre-ignorance of colors and family and love. We see the Sameness and it immediately bring out feelings of negativity because it steals our individuality, something we in the West particularly prize. But who can say whether it's right or not? We don't have an experiment to measure how right or wrong being the Same could be.

This is definitely the type of book that anyone can read, and it does not matter if you're assigned it in high school English or if you just pick it up off the shelves as an adult. It's a thought provoker, and so few books published today seem to be that.