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Lois Lowry is an interesting case.  While her books are enjoyable to many adolescents, Number the Stars and The Giver are often assigned as required reading in middle school classrooms.  As such, I would put the odds split at 50/50 that students would read Lois Lowry for pleasure or academic reading.  According to Applebee (1992), the canon of young adult literature does not easily change. Because of that, it is highly likely that students will be required to read one of Lois Lowry's canon novels.  Despite a couple of her books being part of the canon, students still choose to read them.  Hazlett, Johnson, and Hayn (2009) found that “young adult literature was used only for independent reading or Silent Sustained Reading, to complement adult classics, or to fill summer reading lists” (para. 31). In my experience, students often choose to read a Lois Lowry book during these times - sometimes one of her canon novels; other times one of the companion books to The Giver (Gathering Blue, The Messenger, or Sun), or just one of her many other books (The Anastasia series, the Sam Krupnik series, etc.).  Because of the dual nature of her books, I see it as equally likely that students would read her books for academic purposes and for pleasure.

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I see the age range for Lois Lowry readers to be in the younger adolescent range -- 12-16 or so. Certainly, some readers outside that range would find her work interesting, but I think those most drawn to her books would fall in middle school to early high school.  Her novels deal with difficult themes (e.g. the Holocaust in Number the Stars, puberty, murder, state control, etc. in The Giver series) that would often draw an older audience, but she does it through the eyes of younger adolescents who are just starting their journeys in identity formation and puberty.  In The Giver, Jonas is 12.  In Number the Stars, Annemarie is 10. When it comes to readability, the quantitative measures of many of her books make them quite accessible to younger readers, while still dealing with themes that draw older readers.  In my teaching, I have seen The Giver as a required  text at both the 6th grade and 7th grade level.  That said, when I student taught, I had an 8th grade class do a literature circle using the entire series (except Sun, which had not yet been published). One fun part of that project is that the students then made a movie as a sequel to what was then a trilogy!

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Lois Lowry has won the Newberry Award twice: for Number the Stars in 1990 and for The Giver in 1994.

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This image is a freeze frame of Lois Lowry giving a speech after accepting the Free Speech Defender Award in 2015. I think this image is important because it shows Lois Lowry being awarded for promoting something important in YA literature - free speech.

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Lowry, L.  (1993).  The giver.  New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers.

The Giver follows 12-year-old Jonas as he is exposed to the hidden sides of his seemingly idyllic community. To eliminate conflict, the community has made everyone more or less the same. Children are chosen for families, everyone is assigned a role, the community has no color, memory, or otherwise distinguishing features. Jonas is chosen to become the Receiver of Memory, the only person who has access to books and other memories of the community. As he begins receiving the memories from the Giver, Jonas is made aware of the ugly and violent ways the community has become what appears from the outside as a utopia. Together, Jonas and the Giver decide now is the time to make things change.