Deep Dive Into Jane Lee

2023.10.5

  I am a reader who loves emotions. And tragedies with happy endings. And struggle, pain, heart ache, but mostly, development of a character.

I am also a big fan of precise description, and intricate worlds.

I was quite surprised, in the beginning, at the lack of emotions from the characters. And the lack of… essentially, life. Their lives consisted of only one thing- to obey, but not to know.

And that is astonishing for us today, after all, aren’t mankind inquisitive creatures? Have we not developed from our inquisitiveness, have we not, asked questions and brought ourselves into magnificent discoveries?

But the book itself is honest, and humble. The fact that elders, and twins, are released, or that they must share their dreams, eat pills to avoid the ‘stirrings’- all of this was so carefully laid out, so delicately planned, and so… truthful that I felt like it was a real world.

So, this is how the story lays out its backstory.

This world (or so called, the community) is, to my inference, the future. They live in a small village like place, where things are very much different from what we are like now today. Jonas, the main character, lives in the village with his younger sister Lily and his parents.

For the first thing, they cannot see color. They only see shades and shades of grey, and nothing else.

They don’t understand emotions. They do not, literally, know or feel emotions.

Every family must have one boy, and one girl (children) and no more.

When twins are born, they are released (killed) because it would cause confusion.

No-one can even glance at a person’s nakedness, only the elderly and the newborns can be watched.

At twelve, every child gets assigned a job.

There are no animals.

And much more. The world, frankly, sounds horrifying. It sounds like a place with no life, no color, no… nothing. It’s like the barren field of a desert in the middle of nowhere. There is no freedom, no choice. You can’t choose your job, your wife or husband, whether you want to live or not.

The book is not a happy, frisky book like you might think it is. Because the main character, Jonas, is given a job called ‘the receiver of memory’. And only one person gets this job- to receive (bit by bit) memories of the past- our present.

The most heart-breaking moment was when Jonas realizes that releasing, wasn’t a person going to another community- it meant death. Something only Jonas knew- and the giver, his trainer- from the memories he had received.

 Jonas cries, sobs, yells, screams. That moment, I felt a sharp pain in my eye. It was too emotional. I felt him. I felt for him. To live in a world where only you know what’s wrong with it, where only you know what is wrong with it. To live in a lonely world where you must be the only one to endure that pain, agony of understanding about the past, and the… stillness, fullness of the present. To have to endure it, for the sake of everyone else.

And I love this book, and every bit of it, except for…

Asher.

Now don’t get me wrong, it just feels like he’s such a big brat. Especially because he doesn’t understand why Jonas cries because of a war game, and is annoyed at him for that. At that moment, he felt nothing like a big brat, big-headed, unknowing. I hate those selfish people who can’t see past their own point of view. And I can’t blame Asher for it, since he doesn’t know about war, or feelings, but the intensity of hate is still, very strong.

This book was a mind gripping tale, and I finished it in a day. It was deep, insightful, and another door to such a unique, new world we have never seen. I have to say, I have simply, loved this book.

But I don’t want to be one of the characters.