The Giver meets The Hunger Games?

I must say this novel was much more interesting than I initially thought it would be. I thought this novel was going to mainly comprise of the history of making tea and the with some components of how water is involved, but it’s much more than that. As I was reading, I drew several text-to-text connections.

On page 40, Noria uses her “imagination” to create the sensation of snow within her mind. Itaranta uses strong imagery when describing snow as having a “silvery-white shimmer” (Itaranta 40). Her description of snow was so vivid that someone who has never experienced snow would be able to grasp its concept. This reminded me of the novel, The Giver by Lois Lowry, where the protagonist, Jonas, becomes the ‘Receiver of Memories’. Similarly, Jonas is given the memory of snow as well, but in a delightful setting where he goes sledding down a hill. However, when Noria asks her mother “Why don’t we have snow and ice anymore?”, she replies that the “world [has] changed” (Itaranta 40). When reading this I sensed a melancholy tone in the mother’s voice signaling that the world has changed not for the better. As soon as Noria starts to imagine the snow, I realized how the mood of that moment has changed to a more subtly cheerful one. This can be seen through the diction of words like, “glowed…white light…radiant…brighter…”, that Itaranta decides to use when describing snow. In both cases, in Memory of Water and The Giver, the concept of snow has seemed to lightened the overall mood of the protagonist.

Another text-to-text connection I made was to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. The setting of Memory of Water seems to take place in the future where there is a strict government order that watches over the actions of its citizens, especially their use of water. In this novel, there it is also mentioned of a past-world, in which all the books were drowned and tools/equipment were buried in what the present-world calls ‘plastic graves’. When Commander Taro calls a raid on Master Kaitio’s abode, this reminded me of the ruthlessness of the government in The Hunger Games, where they watch tributes to play in a ‘killing game’. Even when Commander Taro didn’t find anything illegal with the water use, he did not repair the damage. The actions of both the higher social order in The Hunger Games and Memory of Water seem to be sadistic and remorseless. Another similarity is the setting of both The Hunger Games and Memory of Water, which seem to take place in a futuristic world where the past is unknown and kept a secret by the government.