"Building 903" by Lois Lowry

Everyone should know Lois Lowry; The Giver and Number the Stars are both absolute classics. I was more than a little surprised to see this book coming out, as I didn’t think Lowry was still writing. But The Giver was so formative for me I leapt at it.

This is set in a dystopian future, after numerous climate change catastrophes, in a United States ruled by a man who is the only one allowed to run in the supposed elections still being held (his crassness, cycling through wives, and oddly colored dyed hair make the inspiration here… unsubtle). Peoples’ lives are tightly controlled, and many things are outlawed. Our protagonist, Tessa, learns about some of them when her elderly-but-spry neighbor is sent to mandatory retirement and slips her a collection of contraband - strange things called “books” that are full of oddly compelling untruths called “stories.” Tessa’s twin brother had vanished several months before the story, and there are clues that his disappearance was also connected to these illegal books.

If this sounds thematically familiar to The Giver, it’s because it is. And that’s what leads me to conclude I’m fundamentally incapable of giving this book a fair review.

The Giver was, as I said above, formative for me. I read it somewhere around age 10 and it completely blew my mind. So as I was reading this book, which addressed so many of the same themes and with a setting so reminiscent of the dystopia of The Giver, I expected to feel the same kind of thing. That didn’t happen, and I truthfully think it wasn’t fair of me to expect it to. The Giver doesn’t hold up that well as an adult; I revisited it a few years ago, and it was very definitely targeted at younger readers than me. I had the same kind of problems with Building 903 as I did then, having things in my head like, “oh come on, they managed to outlaw STORIES?”

And yet I didn’t have a problem with that sort of thing with The Giver. So I don’t know. I’ll have to throw this at some of my niblings and see how they feel about it.