So I finally made it through the 4 books that are in the Giver Quartet written by Lois Lowry.
The first book was written in 1993 and the way it ends it doesn't appear as though the next 3 books were actually in the plan to be written at all. They are all dystopian books told with different heroes or heroines (let's just say protagonists) but they all take place during a similar timeline but just in different parts of the same area of what is presumed to be Earth and how each section of society that we discover has gone about handling the apocalypse - which is not ever explained in any big sense - in very different ways.
Some are quite authoritarian and advanced, others have absolute freedom and have suffered a near complete absence of technology, and others have a mix of both that seem to do the best. It's all a matter of perspective and I don't think that Lowry is trying to convince any of the readers of any sort of political ideology, and that is good.
Considered for the most part as children's books, these are very easy to read but I will be honest and say that the difference in quality goes downhill a great deal after the first one.
There's Nadi posing with my 2nd generation Kindle, which has been in my possession for over 20 years. I don't know if they still make Kindles with this level of quality, but other than a broken "home" button that results in me needing to hard reset it after a finish a book in order to get to another one, it functions exactly like it did on day one. Perhaps no one got the planned obsolescence memo back then.
Anyway, the books are all about 150 pages in total if it was a real book and they are all page turners that skip a lot of the flowery and unnecessary detail that so many other authors pad their books with in order to make them longer. I do not like when authors do this and while yes, I get it, you are a famous writer but I am definitely looking at you, Stephen King.
Son is the final book in this series and honestly, it was time to wrap it up and I think she did so in the best way that she possibly could. If you look above you will see that "The Giver" has an award medal on it and it definitely deserves that. The books that follow I would say that they are entertaining but certainly now award-worthy. In a way they kind of feel like they were "pressure-writes" in that Lowry was told by the publisher that if she makes these books we can sell them, and that is exactly what they did. All of the books are "kind of" good but only one of them really stands out as being amazing.
From "Gathering Blue" to "Son" I kind of got the feeling like Lowry didn't really know where to take the story and came up with an idea about a central character and then built the societal story around that one person rather than have a bunch of characters like she did in The Giver who was so profound that he kind of became the main character rather than it being forced upon us
Also, while there are hints of magical powers in "The Giver" The other books start to take on an almost "Harry Potter" lite sort of feel to them and a great deal of the magic seems forced and a bit stupid. This was meant to be a dystopian tale, not a budget Harry Potter series.
If I was to suggest any of these books it would definitely be The Giver which is just outstanding. The remaining 3 are easy to read but they kind of go off the rails and at times seem very contrarian to what you have already read, and at times they accidentally make certain aspects of previous books seem impossible by how the story ends up weaving the books together. Like I said, the last 3 books seemed forced whereas I fee *The Giver" was a labor of love for author Lois Lowry.
All of them are likely available in every single library in North America so you won't even have to pay a single dollar to give them a shot. You can buy The Giver for about $13 and it is free on Kindle Unlimited, which must be a Kindle subscription program that I am unaware of.
I recommend that you really dig into the first one, and if it truly floats your boat, maybe dig into the others. If you do like the first one but don't know if you are in for another 450 pages, I believe that "Son" would be the 2nd best of the 4 and it also uses a lot of the same characters and settings. The two in the middle I believe have a lot of filler and use entirely too much in the way of magical powers - most of which are not explained very well and are used out of nowhere.
All in all, these are all really easy to read and accessible and I therefore recommend all of them.