My Favourite Series // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 3

Hello and welcome to the third day of the 30-Day Book Challenge, in which I write about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, according to each daily prompt. The prompt for today's post is "Your favourite series", so I've chosen to write about a series that - while not my absolute favourite, as I'm not sure I truly have a favourite book series - I feel is excellent and severely underrated. 

Before I go any further, I would like to mention that, at the time of writing, it's currently 11:24pm here in France. This means I have approximately 36 minutes (now it's 35) to write this post and get it up on the blog in order to fulfil the criteria of this daily challenge. Therefore what you are about to witness is a blog post sprint with little to no editing or proofreading before publication. 

Brace yourselves.

In case you couldn't tell from the image above, the series I've chosen for today is The Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry. You may have heard of The Giver, if not the whole quartet, as it's achieved some fame as a piece of assigned reading for middle school students in North American schools. This is how I initially found out about The Giver, since my sister followed the US curriculum in middle school and was thus assigned this classic, Newbery Award-winning novel for English.

The Giver is a very good book in its own right, and in fact I'm not sure that it was ever intended to be part of a series, so well does it stand on its own. The plot follows Jonas, a boy who lives in a dystopian community where only one person at a time is selected to bear the memories of the entire society. This person, essentially a human history book, is known as the Receiver of Memory. Jonas is selected to become the new Receiver of Memory, leading him to become an apprentice to the current Receiver and gradually acquire knowledge of history - and the dark truths about his community that come with it.

I can't explain too much about the plot of the sequels without giving away the ending of The Giver, so I will stick to saying that the following books are all set in the same universe and also deal with dystopian societies, although the extent to which these are connected to Jonas's world varies from instalment to instalment. They deal with many similar themes, too, such as problems of individuality vs. community, struggling against authority, the way we place value on human life, and even the nature of evil. 

Perhaps the heaviness of its content is why The Giver Quartet has not enjoyed the sort of commercial success as other dystopian book series for young adults: The Hunger Games, Divergent, and the like. The series as a whole is also substantially less well-known than its first book. If you look on Goodreads, you'll see that The Giver has a little over 1.5 million ratings. Gathering Blue, the second book in the quartet, has less than 150,000. The figure drops lower with each successive book, until the final novel in the series - Son - has just under 76,000. 

This lack of popularity is why I've picked The Giver Quartet as my favourite series, for the sake of this challenge. While I could easily choose something like Harry Potter or the Song of Ice and Fire series, books that probably equal my love for the Giver Quartet, I doubt writing about either of those would be presenting anything new. The Giver Quartet, on the other hand, is comparatively unknown, even by those who enjoy dystopian books or young adult book series. I hope that, by writing this, I might have introduced these wonderful books to at least one person who might not otherwise have heard of them.

On one final note, not to spoil tomorrow's post, but I will say that it will involve more talking about The Giver Quartet in greater detail. So if you enjoyed this post and want to know more about this series, keep an eye out for that one.