Review of the Day: Building 903 by Lois Lowry

Building 903
By Lois Lowry
Clarion Books (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$19.99
ISBN: 9780063515109
Ages 9-12
On shelves September 29, 2026

Can a person be too angry to write a good book?

That Lois Lowry is a great children’s book writer is without question. She’s been able to traverse not simply different genres in her older fiction (the fact that the same person wrote both The Giver and Number the Stars still floors me), but different age groups as well. She’s won Newberys, and her books are known beyond the children’s literary sphere. I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People” and the sole person they have ever discussed on that show that is still alive is Lois Lowry (in terms of The Giver, of course). The woman knows how to write a book. Still, I’m not entirely certain what to make of Lowry’s latest title Building 903. Or, rather, I know what to make of it, but I’m uncertain how it came about. Ostensibly a book about the power of story in a world where story is now a distant memory, Lowry’s title simply doesn’t work. Not as a work of literature, not as a warning about our current era, not even as a comprehensible story. It’s as if the author was almost too upset with the state of the world today, and it affected the tale she wanted to tell. A rare misfire from a literary legend.

It’s been a while since Theo disappeared. Tessa, his twin, is, like the rest of her family, trying not to think about him too much. Life is pretty normal besides the fact that he literally vanished into thin air one day, though. She goes to school. Doesn’t cause trouble (you wouldn’t want to with all those government cameras watching you). Her president has been president for a LONG time, and probably will always be. Sadly, her elderly neighbor Miriam is being taken to a place that cares for older people (even though she doesn’t want to go) but that’s okay. But when that same neighbor leaves Tessa a mysterious key to a room full of boxes of illegal books (and all books are illegal), it upends everything Tessa ever knew. After all, in all her life, Tessa has never known what a “story” even is…

Lowry undoubtedly knew when writing this book that comparisons would be made to The Giver. Both are middle grade novels set in distinct dystopias (though they are very different dystopias from one another). A dystopia, ideally, is a world in which the characters believe that they are living in a utopia, until all it takes is one little string for someone to unravel that overarching lie. This world has a couple advantages over The Giver’s, of course. Tessa’s parents love one another and her. She feels that she can trust them (almost too much, if you ask me). Of course, no one knows what a story is, and the president is a tyrant, and then there are a bunch of little individual freedoms that have been whittled away. Still, it’s not like they’re killing babies or anything like they are in The Giver. That may explain why Lowry decides to hand off the whole revolution aspect of the book (an oddly superfluous detail that seems to have been tacked on only because she thought it would be too depressing if she let the current state of the world stand) to the faceless masses. This is a book where the overthrow of a tyrannical government is its least interesting element. Which is fine, but I can’t help but imagine how much stronger the book would be if at the end Tessa and Theo decide to join forces with the tattooed man guarding the books and they begin a life as revolutionaries, introducing stories to the masses.

It might have been more interesting if the revolution had been a little more central, but main characters don’t even get to participate in it! Their sole contribution to this new world dawning may be the fact that they know about the books, but even in that they’re not going to be unique because apparently the leader of the revolution has been hanging out at Building 903 (where all the illegal books are held) already. Who, I shall remind you, is their neighbor’s son. I guess that’s good, because if we know anything about revolutions it’s that when a new power fills the void of an old power, the newbies have a tendency to get rid of anyone they deem loyal to the previous administration. Tessa’s family would be in serious danger (her mom is an important security person and her dad is one of the elite geniuses). But since they met the guy who is the leader of the revolution and gave him his baseball glove back, I guess he’ll spare them? Someone needs to write the dystopian sequel to this dystopia. I mean, we know that tattoos are forbidden, so clearly it’s not all happiness and roses after this. To the book’s credit, however inadvertent, I did have the chilling thought that the world that comes after this is the world of The Giver. You can’t rule it out…

One might point out that Lowry really couldn’t put her back into the revolution happening in the book because if she did then it would add many more pages to the text. One of the great strengths of Lois Lowry is how short her books are. While other books might flail about with excess chapters, scenes, and characters, Lowry keeps things thin and tight. A kid approaching her books won’t balk at the size of them. She is almost always approachable in this way, and generally that works for her. Unfortunately, in the case of Building 903, I can’t help but feel that maybe ten additional chapters wouldn’t have been out of place. The pace of the book feels rushed (with one notable exception that I’ll get to) and details get muddied. For example, at one point the tattooed man is revealed to be their neighbor Miriam’s son. It’s played as a dramatic reveal, but I had to go back through the book to see if she’d ever even mentioned having a son in her conversations with the family. She had mentioned the same man by name, but she mentioned him as a friend who had been captured long ago (after laughing at the notion that she would have kids). I was able to piece it all together, but pity the poor kid that feels compelled to go back and do the same. And then, of course, there’s the aforementioned revolution that just sort of comes out of the blue. The foreshadowing for it, such as it is, feels more perfunctory than anything else.

There is, of course, one area upon which Lowry lavishes a great deal of time and attention: The exposition of what happened to Theo. Theo, as you will recall, has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When at long last Tessa’s father decides to explain what precisely happened to his son, it doesn’t take a chapter. It doesn’t take two chapters. It takes five. 56 pages in a 228 page book. And as you might expect, it grinds the action of the book to a screeching halt. Everything slows down as they talk and talk and talk. Tessa’s father attempts to patch in some science to make Theo’s disappearance seem like something other than magic, but it ends up just muddling everything instead. Somehow the science is both too scientific and not scientific enough. Perhaps going the route of When You Reach Me where it is understood that there is science, but doesn’t require microscopic close-ups of the brain would have been a better path to take. Whatever the case, because there is no B storyline, Lowry can’t cut away from this exposition (aside from showing what Theo is currently suffering) as it drags on. Worst of all, when Theo finally does reappear at the end of the book, it’s not so much a relief as it is confusing.

Which brings us to a somewhat baffling element of the book. To rescue Theo, Tessa and her family transcribe a message that says that, “THEO NEEDS TO PRAY”. Which he does. Which rescues him. A literal deus ex machina moment, if you will. The sudden appearance of religion had me sort of flummoxed. This moment isn’t really foreshadowed in any way early on, nor is Lowry known to be a particularly religious writer in the vein of, say, Madeleine L’Engle. One could argue that there isn’t a direct link to God in that moment of prayer, more a connecting with the greater universe, but it is still, inarguably, a spiritual solution to a scientific problem. The Giver had a somewhat spiritual ending of its own, but it was in keeping with the rest of the book. In this case, had this book been written decades past, I’d swear it was an anti-Communist statement. Instead, I’m not entirely certain what it is. My closest guess is that Lowry is associating the human need for story with a deeply spiritual, almost religious, connection. But if that’s the point, one has to dig fairly deep for it.

Getting back to Tess and Theo’s parents, there has been a recent trend lately that I do not approve of. Mainly, that middle grade novels (particularly in 2026) not only contain living and emotionally available and mature parents, but also that those parents are actively involved WITH their children in the story’s adventure. And yes, I’m being a little facetious. But I read a lot of middle grade literature and part of the fun of any novel is seeing how the author is going to get loving guardians out of the way of the action. Usually. As I said, this year the parents seem to all be involved with the mysteries and the clue finding and the what have you. When Tess discovers that she has received books, real live books, from her neighbor, her first instinct is to tell her father. She suppresses that thought nobly… then immediately tells her mom. Now from a practical standpoint, this makes a fair amount of sense. The way that she is written, Tess trusts her parents implicitly (even after her father confesses to doing something that led to Theo’s disappearance) and at no point in this book does that ever change, and this gets to the crux of the trouble I have with her. Tess is a particularly passive protagonist. She DOES have the wherewithal to go into her neighbor’s home undetected at one point, and that’s neat, but after that she does absolutely nothing to move the plot along aside from talking to her brother in their secret language. I confess, I have never wanted a protagonist to be an orphan so badly before.

I’m also a bit uncertain why Lowry thought that making this a story within a story was a necessary move. The book begins in a future beyond the future world of the book, when everything has presumably become better than it was (though I still like my theory that it’s the world of The Giver). Normally, one would do this in a title for kids to reassure the reader ahead of time that no matter how dark the contents of the tale, it’ll all turn out all right in the end. But, of course, things don’t get all that dark in Building 903. They get dark for Theo, but even that is distant from the action of Tessa and her family.

So what precisely happened here? One thought is that it’s possible that Lowry wrote this as a conscious counterpoint to The Giver. The Giver was published in 1993 but I never had a sense that it was a reaction to the era. It’s a rather timeless book, feeling just as fresh and interesting now as ever. Building 903 is, if nothing else, a reflection of 2026. Or perhaps Lowry was curious to try her own hand at a kind of Wrinkle in Time style of writing. One that melds the spiritual with the science fiction. Yet to my mind, the theory that makes the most sense is that she may have written the book from a place of anger. Understandable anger. Anger at the book banners that wish to limit access to stories (or only promote their own versions). Anger at a President that bears more than a passing resemblance to the mockery of a leader that presides, faceless, over this book. It could account for why the book starts strong, but then ends up feeling more like an incomplete first draft that a final novel. Lois Lowry is, as I said, a great children’s book writer, without question. Yet even the greatest writers have moments when they need to get something out of their system. We just don’t need to read them when they do.

On shelves September 29th

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Filed under: Reviews, Reviews 2026