After I raved about The Giver to people smart enough to have read it years ago, I was thrilled when they told me it was actually the first in a loosely-connected trilogy that includes Gathering Blue and The Messenger.

Gathering Blue is the story of Kira, a lame (as in she was born with a bad leg) girl newly orphaned. As in The Giver, the reader discovers the world and community Kira lives in through her eyes. As an orphan, Kira may soon be kicked out of the village. The first few chapters treat the reader to a court hearing of sorts determining if and how she should stay. This world is quite different from the world of The Giver, and dare I say, it's not quite as interesting. Granted, it had a lot to live up to.

Ultimately, Gathering Blue, is good, but it's not great. The novel seemed to divide itself into three parts in my mind: the beginning, where the reader learns the setting; the middle, where the action is rather subdued; and the end, which is once again intriguing, if not riveting as The Giver was.

Perhaps it's not fair to compare Gathering Blue to The Giver. If I didn't know they were related, I wouldn't have spotted the connections between the two. (The connections apparently come in The Messenger, which features characters from both books). It's still an interesting read, and young science fiction fans will likely delight in it. Gathering Blue doesn't have the cross-genre appeal of The Giver, and it doesn't have a powerful enough narrative to intrigue readers of all ages, but upper elementary students would be the ideal audience for it. ( )

Another dystopian novel for ages 10 and up, this one is set in a post-“Ruin” world, where most of the people have regressed to primitive living, and children with physical flaws, like the heroine Kira, are supposed to be left out as babies for “the beasts” to claim. Kira, recently orphaned, is about to lose everything she has—including her life--to fellow villagers. Then the community’s leaders, due to her talent in embroidery, choose her to live in the one building, the Council Edifice (which, from its description, appears to have contained a church) that withstood the Ruin. She is to work on mending and adding to the decorations on the ceremonial robe worn by the "Singer" each year when performing the story of the Ruin at the village “Gathering."

In her new home, Kira meets Thomas, the carver a few years older than herself, working on the Singer’s staff, and Jo, the little girl being trained to replace the aging Singer some day. Like the similarly-aged Jonas in Lowry’s Newbery-winning The Giver, Kira, with the help of a rambunctious “tyke” named Matt, discovers the secrets of her society and makes a choice that will change her life, and perhaps those of the villagers.

This book has some messages about the role of artists in society. Lowry creates an interesting culture where the number of syllables in a person’s name increases as s/he ages. The Ruin Song has some telling words (pages 170-172 in the hardbound edition):
Burn, scourged world,
Furious furnace,
Inferno impure-…

Ravaged all,
Bogo tabal
Timore toron
Totoo now gone…

...“I believe it tells the names of lost places.”

… and if you look carefully, you can identify them.

Actress Katherine Borowitz reads the audiobook quietly and calmly, matching the detached tone of the story, showing emotion only when expressing Kira’s thoughts or memories of her mother, or the rough Fen dialect of Matt.

This book is linked to The Giver, but only near the end, and it isn't necessary to have read it before reading Gathering Blue.

Original review at Bookin' It. ( )

Original review at The Little Bookworm

Kira is orphaned, but the village is not eager to keep her. With her twisted leg, she is considered worthless. After a dispute with a local woman, Kira is taken in by the Council of Edifice for her threading talent. She is given the task of fixing the Singer's robe, but she is missing one thing: the color blue. In the course of restoring the robe and finding blue, Kira learns some shocking secrets about her village.

Kira's village is so cruel and horrible and they don't even realize it. The casual cruelty that they employ to dispose of the sick and the weak as well as the way they treat each other is sickening. I will say that this was a very good book, just not as good as The Giver. The Giver has a quiet creepiness about it so when the twist came, it was truly shocking. The callousness of the village does not lend itself to any surprise. I almost expected it when the shocker was revealed so it was less than astonishing. Other than that, Gathering Blue is an excellent book, very well written with beautiful imagery. I hoping The Messenger will clear up some of the questions and give me more on Jonas. ( )

Lois Lowry writes a haunting story about a futuristic dystopia society where it is survival of the fittest and chaos rules. A small group of men known as the ‘Council of Guardians’ have kept this society struggling to survive gripped in fear with stories of beasts in the surrounding forests, of mysterious deaths and a general lack of resources. Kira, the protagonist had never seen running water before and had to be shown how the bath and toilet worked when she was moved into the Council Edifice. Children in this society are viewed as a nuisance and parents take care of themselves first leaving their children to fend for themselves. Lowry invokes readers to examine closely human morals and ethics that are present in today’s society. Readers are compelled to analyze the positives and negatives of human relationships. Lowry teaches us all that at times it is necessary to challenge the decisions of those in authority as things are not always what they seem to be. ( )

As part of a trilogy and following "The Giver", I had high expectations for this book. Sadly, I was a little disappointed. I didn't like that the book built up to the end and was left open ended. I do have the third book here and found that the third book takes off where Gathering Blue left off, so maybe we will get an ending. The Giver was a great book and maybe Lowry should have stopped with that one! I hope to be proven wrong by the time I finish "Messenger". ( )