Guest Post: Marissa Meyer

Marissa Meyer has kindly written a guest post for my blog and I am so honoured to have her. She is definitely one of my favourite authors at the moment!

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On “The Giver” by Lois Lowry

By Marissa Meyer

 When people ask me to list my favorite books, or some books that have inspired me over the years, I tend to give them a deer-in-the-headlights look. It’s a difficult question, as there are so MANY books that I’ve loved and been moved by that they tend to jumble together in my head into a mesh of titles and authors and plotlines and characters.

 But when asked if there were any books that I feel changed my life, one quickly rises to the top: The Giver by Lois Lowry.

 I read The Giver for the first time in 5th grade and I can still remember the exact feeling I had when, half-way through the book, I realized that the main character was seeing colors for the first time. Colors! My mind was blown, not only because the author had taken such care to drop subtle hints about the color-blind society, but also because I hadn’t seen it coming it all. Suddenly it was as if I was reading a completely different book. I had to stop and reconstruct the image I’d made in my mind of the world I was reading about.

 All these years later, I’m still amazed at how Lois Lowry took something so trivial and made it so vital to the story she was telling. The color red. What a simple thing. What a strange idea, to have something so common, so taken for granted, entirely removed from a society.

 For me, the true magic of this book is that it made me look at all books differently. It showed me, for the first time, that a book could change the way I looked at the world. By taking color away, and then giving it back. It was months after reading The Giver before I could look at an apple the same way—and I don’t think I’ve ever looked at books the same way since.