I so enjoy The Giver! I was never interested in it when I was a kid, likely due to the old man on the cover. I also confused it a lot with The Hobbit which really didn't interest me at the time. How wrong I was! 
 I recently read Gathering Blue, the second book in the Giver Quartet, but I realized I had forgotten what happened to Jonas in the first book. While the two books don't connect in characters (that I can find), they do overlap worlds. I'm hoping the other two books in the series will shed more light on how this society was created. 
 One thing I had not noticed before is the magic of the memory transfer both from Giver to Receiver and then the lost Receivers back into the community. If not for that aspect, the book would seem like a potential post-apocalyptic scenario. But, like the talents of the young adults in Gathering Blue, the memory transfer component lends the story of feeling of magical mystery.