the moment passed and was followed by an urge, a need, a passionate yearning to share the warmth with the one person left for him to love. Aching from the effort, he forced the memory of warmth into the thin, shivering body in his arms.
Gabriel stirred. For a moment they both were bathed in warmth and renewed strength as they stood hugging each other in the blinding snow.
Jonas began to walk up the hill.
The memory was agonisingly brief. He had trudged no more than a few yards through the night when it was gone and they were cold again.
But his mind was alert now. Warming himself ever so briefly had shaken away the lethargy and resignation and restored his will to survive. He began to walk faster on feet that he could no longer feel. But the hill was treacherously steep; he was impeded by the snow and his own lack of strength. He didn’t make it very far before he stumbled and fell forward.
On his knees, unable to rise, Jonas tried a second time. His consciousness grasped at a wisp of another warm memory, and tried desperately to hold it there, to enlarge it, and pass it into Gabriel. His spirits and strength lifted with the momentary warmth and he stood. Again, Gabriel stirred against him as he began to climb.
But the memory faded, leaving him colder than before.
If only he had had time to receive more warmth from the Giver before he escaped! Maybe there would be more left for him now. But there was no purpose in if-onlys. His entire concentration now had to be on moving his feet, warming Gabriel and himself, and going forward.
He climbed, stopped, and warmed them both briefly again, with a tiny scrap of memory that seemed certainly to be all he had left.
The top of the hill seemed so far away, and he did not know what lay beyond. But there was nothing left to do but continue. He trudged upwards.
As he approached the summit of the hill at last, something began to happen. He was not warmer; if anything, he felt more numb and more cold. He was not less exhausted; on the contrary, his steps were leaden, and he could barely move his freezing, tired legs.
But he began, suddenly, to feel happy. He began to recall happy times. He remembered his parents and his sister. He remembered his friends, Asher and Fiona. He remembered the Giver.
Memories of joy flooded through him suddenly.
He reached the place where the hill crested and he could feel the ground under his snow-covered feet become level. It would not be uphill any more.
“We’re almost there, Gabriel,” he whispered, feeling quite certain without knowing why. “I remember this place, Gabe.” And it was true. But it was not a grasping of a thin and burdensome recollection; this was different. This was something that he could keep. It was a memory of his own.
He hugged Gabriel and rubbed him briskly, warming him, to keep him alive. The wind was bitterly cold. The snow swirled, blurring his vision. But somewhere ahead, through the blinding storm, he knew there was warmth and light.
Using his final strength, and a special knowledge that was deep inside him, Jonas found the sledge that was waiting for them at the top of the hill. Numbly his hands fumbled for the rope.
He settled himself on the sledge and hugged Gabe close. The hill was steep but the snow was powdery and soft, and he knew that this time there would be no ice, no fall, no pain. Inside his freezing body, his heart surged with hope.
They started down.
Jonas felt himself losing consciousness and with his whole being willed himself to stay upright atop the sledge, clutching Gabriel, keeping him safe. The runners sliced through the snow and the wind whipped at his face as they sped in a straight line through an incision that seemed to lead to the final destination, the place that he had always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that held their future and their past.
He forced his eyes open as they went downwards, downwards, sliding, and all at once he could see lights, and he recognised them now. He knew they were shining through the windows of rooms, that they were the red, blue and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love.
Downwards, downwards, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and that they were waiting, too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing.
Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.
It’s hard to identify when I began to be aware that The Giver was different from the previous twenty-plus novels I had written for kids. Not while I was writing it, surely. I felt that I was writing an adventure story, trying to make each chapter a cliffhanger; well, I had done that precise thing in Number the Stars several years before. I was trying to create a likable, sympathetic main character with a lot of integrity and a certain amount of introspection: just what I had done in every book I had written for years, from A Summer to Die to Anastasia Krupnik and Rabble Starkey.
So it was not during the writing process, there at my desk for those weeks – eventually months – in 1993 that I realised something was unusual.
But it was also not the day that a radiogram with the news of the Newbery Medal was slipped under the door of my cabin on a boat in Antarctica a year or so later.
It was someplace in between. It was when I began to hear from readers.
I have always heard from readers. I like your book. It made me laugh. Please write back. Anastasia is just like me. Meg is just like me. J.P. is just like me. Please write back. Write more books. Put my name in a book. Send me your autograph.
But suddenly, after The Giver was published, the tone of the letters was different. They still came, most of them, from young people. But now they were not class assignments. They weren’t decorated with stickers and doodles.
Instead, they were long, carefully thought-out, passionate responses to a book that had raised questions in their minds: questions about their own lives, their own futures, decisions they were making, values that they were wondering about for the first time.
At the same time, there came letters from adults. Not the usual school librarians, not the occasional parent. These letters came from adults unrelated to the world of “children’s literature” – these were from adults who had probably not read a “kids’ book” since they were kids themselves. One came from the CEO of a major corporation. One from a Baptist minister. One from a Trappist monk. One from a victim of a multiple-personality disorder. And countless others from the most ordinary of people who seemed, actually, to be startled that a book they picked up casually (“My son asked me to read this.” “I picked this up at a bookstore because the cover looked intriguing.” “My cleaning lady recommended this book to me!”) had so affected them that they felt compelled, for the first time in their lives,
