The Messenger by Lois Lowry

From Goodreads:

For the past six years, Matty has lived in Village and flourished under the guidance of Seer, a blind man, known for his special sight. Village was a place that welcomed newcomers, but something sinister has seeped into Village and the people have voted to close it to outsiders. Matty has been invaluable as a messenger. Now he must make one last journey through the treacherous forest with his only weapon, a power he unexpectedly discovers within himself.

I was so excited to discover that The Giver had a companion book called Gathering Blue. Imagine my surprise when it turns out that it actually has TWO. And really, Gathering Blue was a companion book to The Giver since it didn't actually have much to do with Lois Lowry's original except a general sort of post-apocalyptic weird controlling village concept, but The Messenger is more like a sequel. To both. And I want to talk about how awesome that is but it is way more fun figuring it out for yourself.

While I loved the aspect that I referred to above but can't talk about without spoiling it, The Messenger had all these random elements of..magic? or something? that weren't such a big deal in the previous two books. Sure Jonas could do the memory passing thing and Kira has an almost supernatural ability at creating fiber art and those abilities were important to the stories, but they weren't so much the focus.

The Messenger goes a totally different way. Suddenly everything is magic..the forest has magic, people have special abilities, something supernaturally evil is going on. It doesn't talk about it in quite those terms, but it all felt out of place beside the other two books and I didn't care for that part.

If you loved The Giver then it's worth reading, but I didn't love it.