books 2008: The Giver, by Lois Lowry
I am honestly surprised that I never read this before. I think I would have liked it very much back when I was in middle school. As an adult, I still liked it, but I did feel like I could see many of the plot twists coming. I was also disappointed by the ending. As a kid, I probably would have read it as "hooray they got there!", but as an adult, it read to me more like "he's hallucinating while they freeze to death". Which, you know, I really didn't want. If Lowry meant it to be the good optimistic ending, I wish she'd written one more page, one more paragraph even, upon which people come running out with blankets and hot chocolate to greet them. But I am really not totally sure how she meant it. It's a YA book, so I think she intended the nice ending, but the freezing-to-death ending would probably make more sense. Rgh.