What would it be like to live in a community that protects you from pain, grief, loss, and other difficult feelings? How would it be to have so much sameness among community members that envy was eradicated? What if individuals were prevented from making bad choices?

What would happen in a community that completely downplays genetic connections, a community in which everyone is an adoptee?

Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry envisioned such a community in her 1993 young adult novel The Giver, which is on many banned books lists, and was also adapted into a 2014 film starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep. Over the years, many of us in the adoption community have read The Giver without a backdrop of adoption, but when we re-read it with adoption in mind, the story pops in a completely new way.

Watch here as adoptees, birth parents, and an adoptive parent discuss a dystopia in which emotions are suppressed, Birth Mother is a job assignment, and everyone lives in the fog—except for protagonist Jonas and title character, The Giver.

Special thanks to panelists Julian Washio-Collette and Muthoni Gaciku Kittredge for sharing their observations as an adoptee and birth parent, respectively.

Note: If you are interested in discussing The Giver in your own book club and would like access to our free discussion guide, please write to [email protected] with your request.