Reviews with content warning for Death - Son

Reviews tagging 'Death'

Son by Lois Lowry

6 reviews

katydied's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

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andreac713's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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ravensandlace's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

tw: forced birth (kind of? Children are chosen to give birth and Claire is only 14), child marriage, miscarriage, child abuse and neglect, parental death, C-sections and traumatic birth, kidnapping

I am a huge fan of The Giver series. I thought the concept was so cool back when I was younger, even though I didn’t appreciate it back when I was in high school. Thank god, I gave it another chance a few years ago. But you’ll hear all of that when I review The Giver series as a whole. Anyway, I always had that nagging question in the back of my mind about what happened to the baby Jonas rescued. Well, now I have my answer. Okay, to be fair, I had my answer but now I officially have the whole story.

I will admit, I wasn’t in love with this one like I was with Messenger or the Giver. I am extremely disappointed by my feelings. I wanted so badly to love this book. There was something about this book. I can’t quite tell what it was. Even now, as I write this review weeks later, I still don’t know why I didn’t love this book. There was just something about it, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’m going to try and work it out in this review and together, maybe we shall come up with an answer to my problem of why I didn’t like this book.

Maybe my problem was the main character, Claire. She is from Jonas’ world and was chosen to be a Birthmother. A Birthmother is someone who gives birth to the children. They then take the babies, raise them in a nursery and then give them to families who request an infant. After three births, the mothers then go to work at factories. Things don’t work out for her and long story short, she escapes the world and tries to find her son. I admire her tenacity in trying to find her boy but I just couldn’t bond with her. She just came off as really boring to me. I know that in Jonas’ world, feelings aren’t felt for a variety of reasons, but even though, I didn’t find Jonas boring. There was just something about Claire.

I think my problem with the book was two things. The first problem was that the book was starting to become a bit supernatural. What I mean by supernatural is that Jonas and some others had “powers” but the powers are never truly explained. I have no idea how they got them. It just didn’t fit in with the story. I know that the books themselves are unbelievable, especially Jonas’ world but adding a supernatural element just made the whole story weird. The book would have been just fine without it.

My second and I think most glaring problem was with the ending. I won’t spoil what the ending was but I felt it was wrapped up too nicely. Everything just came together a little too well. Normally, I like happy endings, hell I live for them, but for some reason, it didn’t work with this book. Especially with the ending we got for Messenger. I needed some more angst or unhappiness or something.

Overall, this wasn’t a bad book. It answered a lot of questions I’ve had since I read The Giver. But this just wasn’t my favorite. It had the potential to be so much better. But I’m glad I finished the series. As I mentioned above. keep an eye out for my review of the Giver series as a whole, where I will talk more in-depth about my feelings involving this series.

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hmlongstreet's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

Now that I have read all four books in this series I am left with one question, why? The ending to the series was ok but like the one thing that is really on my mind is how on earth did the world end up like this? They ended up introducing so many characters only to tell a very confusing set of stories that all ended very lackluster. With the way the world in the books was developed you could have easily written 8 more books to add to this series (or more). I am kind of just left like, wow, that's it? Epilogues exist for a reason, please use them Lois Lowry, and if not just don't make open ended stories.

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razzyreads's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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maple_dove's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

There's arophobia and acephobia throughout the entire series. Not only that, there's a lot of assuming genders (yes, I know a lot of books do this but it still ticks me off), and gender roles (even though a couple of them were switched around in the first book)(and all the MCs have a love interest).

I'll admit, I sped through this book in a day and sucked in, but I'm disappointed/let down.

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