Son Study Guide

Lowry is the oldest of two children. When she was born, her parents initially gave her a Norwegian name (her father was of Norwegian descent), but when her paternal grandmother objected, they named her Lois. Her father was an Army dentist, so her family moved often around the United States and the globe. She attended junior high school in Japan, but she graduated from high school in New York City. Lowry enrolled at Brown University, but she only completed two years. She dropped out when she married her husband, and the two had four children. They settled in Maine after her husband ended his military career. Lowry ultimately completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern Maine. A lifelong writer, she worked as a freelance journalist and photographer and in 1977 published her first novel, A Summer to Die. At this point, she and her husband decided to divorce. Lowry has written a number of children’s novels since then. The Giver and Number the Stars have both won Newbery awards. Lowry has said that Son was inspired, in part, by her son’s 1995 death in a plane crash. He was an Air Force flight instructor, and his plane crashed due to a mechanical error.

As a sci-fi and fantasy novel that takes place in a world similar to the reader’s, but which isn’t ours, it can be difficult to place Son (and for that matter, the entire Giver Quartet) in a historical context. In her Newbery acceptance speech for The Giver in 1994, however, Lowry has said that she was inspired to create this world in part because people kept asking her why her Holocaust novel, Number the Stars, had to exist at all—that is, why it was important to continue talking about historical horrors like the Holocaust. The community where Claire, Gabe, and Jonas come from has eliminated such remembering, and the novel presents this as an extremely flawed choice. The characters’ final village, meanwhile, insists on the importance of remembering the past as a way to do better in the future. In publicity interviews for Son, meanwhile, Lowry has said that it makes sense why contemporary children and teens are so interested in reading dystopian novels like the Giver Quartet, given a media landscape that makes frightening global events impossible to ignore. Such a landscape, she suggested, makes it tempting to dive into novels that explore what the world might become. On an even more personal level, Lowry was inspired to write Son and to focus on Claire’s search for her son as one way to process her grief for one of her sons, Grey, an Air Force pilot who died in a plane crash.

Son is the fourth in Lois Lowry’s Giver Quartet, which consists of the award-winning The Giver, Gathering Blue, and Messenger. Many writers and critics credit Lois Lowry for beginning the young adult and children’s fantasy (and particularly dystopian fiction) boom, which gave rise to popular series such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, and Philip Pullman’s His Mortal Instruments series (beginning with The Golden Compass). In its exploration of a mother’s love for her child, Son shares many similarities with a variety of works, from Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Demeter” and even Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved.