Gathering Blue opens with an unknown character in an unknown world. Sure, it is a dystopian world, but I found myself wondering, isn’t this the second book in The Giver quartet? I even went back to check that I hadn’t started reading the wrong book by mistake. I hadn’t. Yet, there were no overlapping characters that I could find.
Soon enough, however, one similarity between the two books stood out: the utter isolation of the community in which Kira, the protagonist of Gathering Blue, lives. Like Jonas, Kira has no knowledge of the world outside. She has heard of beasts that will drag you away, and she has even heard them growl, but she has never seen a beast. She has never ventured off the beaten path, and has never dared to go beyond the Field.
Where Jonas’s world is too perfect, Kira’s is cutthroat. When her mother dies, the other women, led by the scarred Vandara, want to take away the plot on which her cott was built. Kira is crippled, and Vandara says she must be left on the Field to die. But the Council clearly has other plans. The plot is given to Vandara and the other women, but Kira gets a beautiful place to live in, where she can put her talents to use.
Gathering Blue creates the same sort of unease as The Giver. The unease builds rapidly into something deeply disturbing, heightened by a vague threat that looms over us, all the more malicious because the urbane Jamison smiles on. As Kira’s eyes open to the horrors of the world around her, she finds courage. A story of grit that kept me reading, Gathering Blue leaves me impatient to read the next book in the quartet.
| Title | Gathering Blue |
| Author | Lois Lowry |
| Tags | Dystopia, Middle-Grade |
| Rating (out of 5) | 4.5 |
| Age-group | 11+ |
Leave a Reply