Lois Lowry

We should make sure that they're reading in an environment where they're informed by lots of, where we give them the knowledge to understand the text so they can make inferences about it.

One of my favorite middle school books, which I think, or late elementary school books, is Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.

Great book set in Denmark during World War II, The Nazi Occupation.

And one of the things that we do in our curricular unit for this book is there's a lot that young people might not understand in this book that causes them to not make inferences.

like so much of this reminds me of like early horror books too like R.L. Stine okay

yeah yeah like the the 70s and 80s yeah what was it Lois Lowry who was Lois Lowry yeah yeah

those are like the light-hearted whimsical scary books those were like my first introduction into this idea of horror storytelling then I moved on to Dean Kuntz and then I moved on to Stephen King so like That was my progression.

So those are the ones that I have.

You just said that.

And I just agreed.

We were thinking Lois Lowry wrote The Giver.

Giver.

Okay.

So I read Building 903 by Lois Lowry.

I was generous in giving it a two stars.

I did see the two stars popped up like on Storygraph.

I saw that it popped up and I saw your review, your post on Instagram and I was like, So I, I'm really interested to hear what you have to say.

It's fine.

Lois Lowry doesn't need you.

She doesn't need me, but as a former youth librarian and somebody who loves her work and I just, I went into this really excited and I, and my expectations weren't like overblown too high or anything like that.

I've been using it a lot lately.

I went to see Lois Lowry with my daughters at Parnassus Books.

She had a new book coming out.

But, you know, she wrote The Giver.

Abnegation is in charge of holding all of the memories for the society.

Hello, Lois Lowry.

What is going on?

It was giving the giver down.

It was giving giver.

No, and she references Lois Lowry as being like a big inspiration of hers when it comes to dystopian fiction in the talk she gave the other day.

Because that was also brought up with Kathy, who works at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston.

She was hosting the author talk.

Again, you have the high ground.

Third is Building 903 by Lois Lowry.

And number four is Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico.

And I believe it is my turn to go first.

as we get

deeper in here we gotta you know find

that's right yeah well solid all right uh let's move on to book number three and book number three i've been looking forward to for quite some time which is the new lois lowry book uh building 903 uh Studios podcast knowers will know that I actually reread The Giver not that long ago, maybe two years ago, at the longest, three years ago.

And I am a great admirer of Lois Lowry.

Yes.

Lois Lowry?

Yes, Lois Lowry.

Basically, it's focused on a little... on a small town where everyone is the same and they have little jobs and there's a...

There's a group of elders who control everything, including thought.

It degrades it from a shared collaborative discovery into a condescending lecture.

I cannot think of a better, more heartbreaking example of this than the 2014 film adaptation of Lois Lowry's The Giver.

Oh, that one hurts.

It really does.