Fourth book finally concludes beloved series

Lois Lowry promises that “Son,” her newly published novel for young readers, is indeed the last in a series of four books.

The series started in 1994 with the Newbery Award-winning “The Giver.”

“I thought ‘The Giver’ was a book that stood alone,” Lowry said in a phone interview from her home in Cambridge, Mass. “Over some years, readers were dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the ending. Although I still hadn’t intended to respond to that with another book, several years later I began working on another, ‘Gathering Blue.’ It was a different and new exploration of what the world might become following some catastrophic event.”

	“Son” by Lois Lowry Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, $17.99, 393 pp.

As Lowry concluded writing “Gathering Blue,” and with young readers flooding her with queries about what happened to the character of Jonas, she realized that she had mentioned Jonas, by description and not by name, in the last two pages of Book Two.

Years passed, and Lowry continued to get piles of reader mail about the books. She also had become fond of the character Matt, a child who appears in the second book. So she decided to write a third book. Titled “Messenger,” it takes place seven years later with Matt as a protagonist. And Jonas, now an adult, is also a main character.

OK, readers know about Jonas. But what’s happened to the character of the baby Gabriel, readers asked. So Lowry started writing about teenage Gabe and his determination to learn his origins. “When I began to address that, I began to think about his beginnings. In the society of the first book I described certain young girls selected … to produce babies for the community,” Lowry said.

She put aside that manuscript and wrote “Son.” In it, Claire, is one of the Birth Mothers. The baby is taken from her, but Claire monitors the baby’s whereabouts. When he’s a year old she loses track of him again. Readers follow Claire’s plight as she struggles to overcome memory loss. In the third and final section, Claire regains her awareness, but only after making a terrible sacrifice, Lowry said.