Skip to main content

Book Review: Messenger by Lois Lowry


Matty has lived in Village for six years now, sharing a home with the blind man who is called Seer. Village is the place where those who were unwelcome in other communities have been accepted and thrived. Everyone is kind to one another and there are no secrets. But something is changing in Village ~ people are changing, the forest around Village is changing, and not for the better.

Messenger by Lois Lowry is the third book in the Giver Quartet. In this novel, we are reacquainted with Matty and Kira from Gathering Blue, and Jonas from The Giver, who is now called Leader. Matty is the main character in this story, though. He is the messenger for Village because he is the one who Forest allows to pass through freely to other communities. When the people of Village decide to close to newcomers, it is Matty who must post signs warning others that they are no longer welcome. During this trip through the ever-changing Forest, he seeks out Kira in the hopes of bringing her to Village before it is too late.

I enjoyed the relationship Matty has with Seer, Leader and other characters throughout the book. He is a genuine character who recognizes his own flaws as he explores the gift that he has discovered in himself. I thought Lowry did an excellent job of keeping his personality from Gathering Blue while also showing how he has grown so much since that time.

Once again, there's a magical aspect to the story, with Kira, Leader and Matty all using their special gifts throughout the book. Seeing the storylines of the first two books brought together here was fun, and I'm looking forward to reading the final book in the series, Son, to see how it is all wrapped up in the end.

If you enjoyed The Giver, I strongly recommend you read the rest of the series. While I enjoyed The Giver the most, it's fun to continue the journey in Lowry's world.

My Rating: 4/5

Read my reviews of the other books in this series:
The Giver 
Gathering Blue
Son 
This review was written based on a copy of Messenger that I borrowed from the library.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon


My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…
3 comments
Read more