The Giver
Lois Lowry
 The book focuses on a twelve-year-old boy named Jonas residing in an immaculately-organized, tightly-run, but strict utopian society known as the community of Sameness , where eccentricities in behavior, appearance, or personality are strongly outlawed and opposed. Nearing an age where he will be selected for the position that he will hold in the Community throughout adulthood, Jonas is selected for the role as the Receiver of Memory, the keeper of all ancient memories in the Community before the start of the strict system through which the world is now run. Under the guidance of the older Receiver-of-Memory, the Giver, Jonas is transferred memories that had taken place years prior to the events of the story, involving color, emotion, freedom, and pain, which have since been drained entirely from the Community. Through the Giver, Jonas receives stunning wisdom of the true secret runnings of the Community, including secrets remaining heavily-guarded from its inhabitants, and the boy starts to yearn for the happier world which had been available during the past. He is exposed to shocking footage of his father, a Nurturer, injecting a baby twin with poison (as a means of living up to the Community's mandatory standards of population control) and is shocked by the true intentions and behaviors of the residents in the Community, how their utter inability to accept pain forced their hunger for a Receiver of Memory. The Giver informs Jonas that it is up to him to help restore freedom to the world, and therefore he must flee the town late at night with the other closest option for a Receiver; a baby boy named Gabriel, who Jonas's family had been sheltering for the past few months, so the Giver may convince everyone that they have died so they may once again accept the burden of the pains of their own memories and everything can be restored to how it had formerly been. Jonas must escape to Elsewhere, an unknown land located beyond the boundaries of the Community, and the pair must endure through the freezing cold together, just as Jonas "thinks he hears singing" (a reference to a past memory he'd received).