"The Giver" was recommended to me by my 10th grade English teacher. At first I was skeptical but I decided to give it a try. Although the story starts slow, when it picks up its pace it doesn't stop. "The Giver" is littered with metaphors and anti-conformist messages that really provoke thought. One example of this is that there is a ceremony to choose peoples professions based on their performance and not their choice. This strips away individuality for the "good of the community". As I kept on reading I found myself looking for links between the society in the book, and real-life society. I found that people in society are often trying to conform to certain ideals in order to be productive members of society, thus losing individuality, as in the book. By the time I got to the part in which the memories where being transferred I was already engulfed in the book. The addition of a plot to give people their memories back only made it more interesting. The part of the book i'm bitter about is the ending, In which the protagonist and a baby are almost to a better place and the book just ends. I assumed that they had died and that the memories had been returned to the people, but there is no way for me to be sure.