“Thinking Eases the Pain”: Lois Lowry’s Son and the Giver Quartet’s Resistance to Secular Puritanism

Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) sharply divided critics, with some applauding its progressivism and others condemning its conservatism. The publication of Son (2012), following Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004), reignited the controversy. Following his 2013 article “On the Possibility of Elsewhere: A Postsecular Reading of Lois Lowry’s Giver Trilogy,” Graeme Wend-Walker considers Son’s contribution to the series’ exploration of the spiritual, proposing that it reaffirms Lowry’s commitment to exploring complex social issues through multiple and even outwardly contradictory positions, and that its pragmatic approach to the spiritual challenges the absolutist authority of reductive, linear readings.