Lois Lowry's Children's Books Include Mythic Figures
April 26, 2006By JANE HENDERSON, Post Dispatch Book Editor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Lois Lowry's children are long grown, but she still fields endless questions from kids.
They fill her e-mail inbox, particularly when their class is reading one of Lowry's Newbery Award-winning books, "The Giver" or "Number the Stars."
With straightforward prose but complex themes, Lowry's works lend themselves to the kind of teacher questions that lead to provocative discussions: Is a utopian society really desirable, like in "The Giver"? Are communities obliged to care for others, such as the persecuted Jews in "Number the Stars"?
Her new book, "Gossamer," is inspired in part by children's efforts to understand the world. As Lowry's young grandson once told her: "My head is just so full of thoughts."
Lowry, 69, will be in town tonight to talk about children's thoughts, and her own, at the Buder branch of the St. Louis Public Library.
The thoughts featured in "Gossamer" (140 pages, Houghton Mifflin, $16) are those nocturnal mysteries known as dreams. Lowry has imagined a community of "dream-givers," creatures that bestow dreams on sleeping humans.
She writes: "Through touching, they gather material: memories, colors, words once spoken, hints of scents and the tiniest fragments of forgotten sound. They collect pieces of the past, of long ago and of yesterday. They combine these things carefully, creating dreams. ... Every human population has countless such colonies - invisible always - of these well-organized, attentive and hard-working creatures who move silently through the nights at their task."
Lowry, who discussed her books from Cambridge, Mass., says kids who love books buy into such fantasy. That world "will become real to them very quickly."
Although "Gossamer" is different from "The Giver" and two books that follow it, making up a trilogy, Lowry says that all probably have mythic elements.
"I'm thinking of recurring mythic figures in literature," she says. "Some of those figures appear in 'The Giver,' 'Gathering Blue' and 'Messenger,' such as the wise old person. That is true in 'Gossamer' as well. The ones who teach the young and transmit the knowledge. That is a mythic figure."
In "Gossamer" the creatures go by adjectival labels such as Most Ancient, Fastidious and Littlest One.
The book has somber elements as well. "Gossamer" opens with a night scene: "An owl called, its shuddering hoots repeating mournfully in the distance. Somewhere nearby, heavy wings swooped and a young rabbit, captured by sharp talons, shrieked as he was lifted to his doom."
The humans featured in the story, the recipients of the dreams, include a lonely older woman, a boy in foster care and his struggling mother.
Lowry doesn't shield young readers from some of the more depressing aspects of life.
"I don't think kids need to be protected from the tragic," she says.
Her first book for children, in fact, was based in part on the fact that her sister died at age 28 and how the death affected her family. "A Summer to Die" was published in 1977, the same year Lowry's marriage ended.
She talks freely of another tragedy in her life, the death of her pilot son in a military accident.
"That's become a part of who I am," Lowry says. "He's part of my history."
Her other three children are still living, and she has four grandchildren ranging in age from 23 to 5. Lowry's companion of 26 years (whom she sometimes refers to as her husband) shares her homes in Cambridge and a 235-year-old Maine farmhouse.
Although she obviously respects history, she doesn't expect children to read long, old-fashioned novels.
"I don't think a kid will sit still for Dickens or 'The Secret Garden,'" she says. "I have to speed it up a bit."
However, that doesn't mean her books talk down to them.
"For the most part, kids that I write for tend to be introspective, discriminating young readers," Lowry says. "If you think of them as dumb adolescents, then that is what they are going to be for you. I respect them."
"The Giver" is expected to be made into a movie, and Lowry says Jeff Bridges may star as the title character.
A movie of her best-known work will probably fill her e-mail with even more questions. She has some boilerplate responses for the standard how-did-you-get-the-idea-for-the-book questions.
But she hopes that class discussions go deeper, and she has her own tip for teachers:
"I wouldn't focus on minor facts, but on the concepts and how they relate to actual lives."
