I've taught this to sixth graders for years. It's never the big machinery that snags them, it's the little clinical wrongnesses. My kids fixate on the unique spin on normal, everyday things we take for granted, such as color, or calling a stuffed animal a comfort object. "Comfort objects" are assigned at infancy and automatically taken away at age eight, collected again like an overdue library book, and what kid calls a stuffed animal a "comfort object" with no issues? The toy is usually a soft, stuffed, "mythological" creature like an elephant, and a day or two in, somebody realizes the community keeps no animals at all, so no child there has ever seen the thing their toy is shaped like.

That's the whole method. Everywhere euphemisms are used to protect people from the truth, and it is creepy in its quiet way, and drives the point in an almost more disturbing way than books with extreme violence. You don't notice the floor is gone until you've stepped off it.

Then the memories start and the room goes quiet. He sees an elephant that was killed for its tusks, and we learn that there are no animals in his world, and my kids, raised on nature documentaries, are stunned a boy meets an elephant first through its murder. He sees soldiers dying in a field too, a boy soldier bleeding out and begging for water. Teachers will have to know their students' backgrounds and may need to handle this part of the book carefully, so I give a heads up before that chapter.

But the scene that breaks the class every year is the release. One example of this is when the newchildren, if twins, are weighed, and then Jonas's own father takes a newborn, fresh out of the womb, weighs it, and then kills it in cold blood, crooning to it like some sociopath. When we get to the climax of the novel and Jonas realizes what really happens during a release of an infant, my students are outraged! Half of them hadn't understood what release meant until that exact moment.

What I've come to appreciate is the bargain underneath: a safe and content community that knows no pain and suffering, but the price they pay is no real love or feelings, either. The price is never seeing, never choosing, never loving anyone. Plus, it was a very short book, easy to fit in an afternoon. I never once found myself getting bored. Neither, somehow, have my kids.