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The Cure Sonia Levitin 9780380732982 Books

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The Cure Sonia Levitin 9780380732982 Books

I found this book in the library of my old high school back in 2004. Eleven years later, the story still haunts me; as if it is engraved into my memory for all time. Books like these show make you face your own humanity. They strip away the veil people these days seem to don like a second skin and reveal the harsh truths behind it. I don't know how this book found its way into that library, but I feel as if it were fate. Books that stay with you... The words, the characters, the stories; they shape who you eventually become. Hopefully, they make you decide to dedicate your life to what is right. They make you want to be better. I especially think, at this dark turning point in the history of humanity, that every American should read this book.


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The Cure Sonia Levitin 9780380732982 Books Reviews

I love dystopian fiction. The combination of vivid worldbuilding and poignant social commentary draws me in every time. I'll never forget my first visit to Huxley's giddy, superficial World State, or Orwell's bleak, heavy-handed Oceania. Lately there's been a real boom in dystopian literature directed at a young-adult audience. So far as I can tell, Lois Lowry started this trend eighteen years ago with the modern classic "The Giver." Unfortunately, few of the writers who have followed in her footsteps have even approached her accomplishment. Scott Westerfield's "Uglies" started so promisingly, but lost its focus halfway through. Suzanne Weyn's "Bar Code" novels also started out strong, only to descend into utter nonsense. In "Truesight," David Stahler all but plagiarized "The Giver" word for word, and still managed to produce a thoroughly awful novel. Lowry set the bar so high even she can't quite measure up "Gathering Blue" was an excellent novel, but to go into it expecting as powerfully transforming an experience as "The Giver" is to be inevitably disappointed. Suzanne Collins has offered up another exception to the general mediocrity with her "Hunger Games" trilogy.

"The Cure" was published in 1999, when the juvenile-dystopia trend was just heating up. Readers of "The Giver" may find Sonia Levitin's United Social Alliance hauntingly familiar, with its bland orderliness, shallow courtesy, muted emotion, and mindless conformity. Gemm, like the title character in Lowry's novel, realizes that he is different when he discovers music, something his society has forbidden due to its power to stir up the passions. When Gemm can no longer suppress his forbidden thoughts, the authorities offer him a choice submit to an arduous and painful "cure," or die. Gemm chooses the cure, and a program is downloaded into his brain that causes him to experience a year in the life of Johannes, a young Jewish musician living in Germany at the time of the Black Death.

Johannes's story, which comprises about three-quarters of the novel, is a beautiful, tragic, and deeply moving tale of love and courage in the face of hatred. His little Jewish community wishes to live in peace, but most of their Gentile neighbors regard the Jews with suspicion and dislike. As the plague spreads across Europe, so do rumors that the epidemic is the result of a Jewish plot to murder Christians. In the face of this growing anti-Semitic panic, Johannes and his family find their lives turned upside down over the course of a year filled with grief, loss, strength, and love. In the end, even their most sympathetic neighbors will be powerless to hold back the tide of persecution that threatens to destroy them all.

I believe this would have been a much stronger novel if Levitin had stuck to telling Johannes's story, rather than trying to frame it within a weak dystopian plot. The sixty pages we're given of Gemm and the United Social Alliance aren't enough to bring his world and his culture to life in the reader's mind. The transition from Johannes back to Gemm comes as a letdown, and the final two chapters feel rushed and forced, as if Levitin had expended her real passion at the climax of Johannes's story and didn't have the energy or interest left to deal with Gemm.

Despite its flaws, "The Cure" is well worth the read, if only for the Johannes chapters. Although the novel comes across as annoyingly didactic in its final pages, Levitin doesn't offer us any easy answers Good and evil, cowardice and courage, right and wrong just aren't that simple in these pages, any more than they are in real life. She comes down hard against hatred and prejudice, and yet understands why they happen. She doesn't offer any pat, magical solutions to the question of how to maintain harmony in a world of diversity. Readers who don't usually gravitate to historical fiction may be drawn in by the sci-fi premise, and they may well find "The Cure" an unexpectedly moving experience.
Ty for the right book. it took me a long time to find it and I'm glad I did!
Arrived in perfect condition, no tears or unreasonable wear or markings.
This was my book club's book. I was a bit leery about how we were going to have a sci-fi medieval history book, but she really pulled it off. Being a history buff, I really felt like I was there and seeing history through the eyes of a young Jewish man. It was very engaging. The "cure" was totally unexpected, and we disagreed on what the cure actually was. It might have been better with more detail about the future time, but overall I really liked this book. I found myself thinking about this book for weeks after finishing it.
This was a good book--there are others on similiar topics that are better. What I did like it about it was that it wasn't about the holocaust but yet still managed to be about repression of Jewish people.
Great, perfect condition
I first read this book back in middle school, and had to read it again, but couldn't find it at the local library. For as hard as this book is to find, it is a great read. Similar in purpose to The Giver, but with a totally different way of applying it.
I found this book in the library of my old high school back in 2004. Eleven years later, the story still haunts me; as if it is engraved into my memory for all time. Books like these show make you face your own humanity. They strip away the veil people these days seem to don like a second skin and reveal the harsh truths behind it. I don't know how this book found its way into that library, but I feel as if it were fate. Books that stay with you... The words, the characters, the stories; they shape who you eventually become. Hopefully, they make you decide to dedicate your life to what is right. They make you want to be better. I especially think, at this dark turning point in the history of humanity, that every American should read this book.