Matty enjoys his job as his village's courier, bringing messages to whoever needs them, but worries about the new rumblings in town of residents wanting to stop newcomers from joining their society. He becomes determined to get his friend from a nearby community over to his village while he still can.

So, this book brings together the first two titles in the series, showing the connection between them that was hitherto unknown. For that, I definitely appreciated it. It was also good to see how the various characters have grown and developed in the intervening years since we saw them last.

However, that being said, I felt like this book brought up topics (e.g., the trade market suddenly becoming evil) without fully explaining them, although I suppose there's still potential in the last book of the series to answer everything completely. I'm not so sure about that though as so far, I feel like each book only raises more questions. I also really didn't like the ending of this book with Matty having to sacrifice his own life to stop the forest from taking over and in general didn't like to see that even the newest society was already having issues, as that was really demoralizing and didn't leave much hope for the small changes that had been made in places like Kira's community.

As I've gotten this far already, I am going to continue on to the next and final book in the series to see what happens but if this one had been first, I probably would have dropped the series right away. ( )

Mystery

I raced through this one, as I was eager to find out what happened with Matty and Kira. I'm not sure I liked the ending, it felt a bit rushed, but liked the book overall. ( )

Really enjoying this series. Looking forward to number 4. ( )

(2.5 / 5)

I do not know where Lois Lowry is going with this series at this point. I don't understand much of anything after reading this third book in the series. And since, at the time of this book's release, it seemed to be considered the end of a trilogy, I can understand why a lot of people were quite unhappy with it at the time that it came out. It sort of gives us a little continuation of the first book in the series, but it heaps on new questions and confusions, and puts absolutely none of them to rest. Why did Forest begin to become corrupted in the first place? Where did the Trade Mart come from, and how was it connected to Forest? What happened to the Trade Mart leader at the end of the book? I guess the book is meant to be one huge allegory about people giving up parts of themselves for something superficial, but it's pretty subtle, so I really doubt kids of the age it's meant for will pick up on that at all. And maybe that's even what already happened in the village that Matty, the Seer, and Kira came from, considering that they're pretty much just terrible people there, but it's definitely not stated to be such.

I'm not necessarily against a story that leaves some questions unanswered, though I generally don't prefer it, but this took that to a whole new level. There was really no resolution to anything but what I can only assume is a symptom of something greater. Will things just start to get bad again eventually? I hope not, because the fix in this book can't really be applied again, not that the fix really makes sense to me in the light of the allegory the author may or may not have been intending. I still have the final book in the tetralogy to read, so maybe answers will come there, but at this point, I'd have a difficult time recommending that fans of The Giver continue the series. ( )