Lois Lowry's Son is the fourth (and apparently last) installment in her Giver series. I really loved The Giver, and I'm glad I read Son. In the end, it left me quite unsatisfied. Two of its three sections are directly relevant to the issue of liberty.

There are lovely and clever connections to The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger, but Son stands alone and is perfectly comprehensible without prior knowledge of Lowry's other works.

The first section, “Before,” takes place in the dystopian community of The Giver, where there is no individuality, no choice, and no emotion. The heroine, Claire, is a young teen who is chosen to become a birth mother for the community. She becomes pregnant by artificial insemination, she gives birth to “The Product” (the baby boy is taken immediately to be raised communally, and she's blindfolded so she won't even see him), and she's reassigned elsewhere. Through a bureaucratic oversight, however, she's never given the pills all citizens take to make them compliant sheep, and because of this, she has a sense of self and a sense that her baby belongs with her. The rest of the novel is about her struggle to reunite with him.

The second section, “Between” offers a terrific contrast to the first by showing what a relatively free community looks like, one that welcomes all and maintains few rules or regulations. There's trade and barter, there's individuality, there's love; the world, quite literally, has color for Claire for the very first time. There she finds support and encouragement and the strength to plan her trip to find her son.

The short final section, “Beyond,” is where things fall apart, because what was a science fiction story morphs into a simplistic, fantastic allegory featuring the final standoff between Claire's son Gabe (Gabriel, an angel?) and the “Trademaster" (pure evil, the fallen angel?). I should note that the Trademaster doesn't represent trade per se; he represents the poor decisions we make, the worst of our natures (to the tune of "I'd rather be handsome than honest,” that sort of thing), the way we give up those parts of ourselves we should treasure. In the end, the triumph is one individual's love for another. The mother-son bond—considered selfish in that dystopian community of “Before”—is what saves not only these two individuals, but also their whole community.

As disappointing as I found the final section, I still think this has a lot to say. The first two sections are quite well done, and the contrast between the two communities is powerful.