The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver is a 1993 soft science fiction novel by Lois Lowry. The Giver is set in a future society which is at first presented as a utopian society and gradually appears more and more dystopian. The novel follows a boy named Jonas through the twelfth year of his life. The society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to "Sameness", a plan which has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of "Receiver of Memory," the person who stores all the memories of the time before Sameness, in case they are ever needed to aid in decisions that others lack the experience to make.
Despite controversy and criticism that The Giver's subject material is inappropriate for young children, The Giver won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 5.3 million copies. In Australia, the United States and Canada, The Giver is a part of many middle school reading lists, but The Giver is also on many banned book lists and appeared on the American Library Association's list of the most challenged books of the 1990's. The novel The Giver forms a loose trilogy with Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004), two other books set in the same future era. This society remains harmonious by assigning jobs to each individual according to a laborious evaluation of their skill, by matching up husbands and wives based on personality to balance out each other, and only allowing two children, one male and one female, per family unit... (Summary by Wikipedia)