Banned Book Club: "The Giver" by Lois Lowry
Schedule
Tue Apr 28 2026 at 11:00 am to 12:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Bookstore1Sarasota | Sarasota, FL
About this Event
The Banned Book Club is led by Bryn, dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation.
This month, we’re reading The Giver by Lois Lowry — the quietly radical dystopian novel that asks what a society loses when it eliminates pain, risk, and memory in the pursuit of safety. When twelve-year-old Jonas is chosen to inherit the community’s collective memories, he begins to understand what has been sacrificed in the name of order: love, grief, individuality, and choice.
The Giver has been widely banned and challenged in schools and libraries for its themes of euthanasia, emotional intensity, and its critique of authoritarian “utopias.” Censors often object to the discomfort the book deliberately creates — the necessary shock of recognizing the human cost of erasing complexity from public life.
Spare, profound, and enduringly relevant, The Giver remains one of the most formative works of young adult literature — a reminder that freedom requires remembering what it means to feel.
We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $11.99, which includes a copy of The Giver to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
Whether she’s writing comedy, adventure, or poignant, powerful drama—from Attaboy, Sam! and Anastasia Krupnik to Number the Stars and The Giver—Lois Lowry’s appeal is as broad as her subject matter and as deep as her desire to affect an eager generation of readers. An author who is “fast becoming the Beverly Cleary for the upper middle grades” (The Horn Book Magazine), Lois Lowry has written more than 20 books for young adults and is a two-time Newbery Medal winner. Lowry was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and attended junior high school in Tokyo, Japan. Her father was a dentist for the U.S. Army and his job entailed a lot of traveling. She still likes to travel. At the age of 17, Lowry attended Brown University and majored in writing. She left school at 19, got married, and had four children before her 25th birthday. After some time, she returned to college and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Maine. Lowry didn’t start writing professionally until she was in her mid-30s. Now she spends time writing every single day. Before she begins a book, she usually knows the beginning and end of her story. When she’s not writing, Lowry enjoys gardening during the spring and summer and knitting during the winter. One of her other hobbies is photography, and her own photos grace the covers of Number the Stars, The Giver, and Gathering Blue. Lois Lowry has four children and two grandchildren. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ABOUT BOOK BANS:
Books are under profound attack in the United States. PEN America's latest report, Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning, found that 6,870 books bans were enacted during the 2024-25 school year, across 23 states and 87 public school districts. And everywhere, it is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history. PEN America pushes back against censorship and the intolerance and exclusion that undergird it.
Check out some frequently asked questions about book banning: https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questions/
Where is it happening?
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 12.83
