Gathering Blue

Author: Lois Lowry
Genre: fiction, young adult
Publication info: Houghton Mifflin, 2000
Pages: 215

Remember The Giver, that Newberry-winner from the 90s? That book that everyone told you to read while you were growing up but you never got around to it until years later? Okay, maybe that's not how it happened for you, but the book somehow got past me until just recently. It's a young-adult book, but it wasn't until my young adulthood that I got around to reading it. (Makes you wonder why they use that label.)

Anyway, Gathering Blue is the sort-of sequel to that captivating book. I say "sort of" because it never refers specifically to anything or anyone in The Giver; only the mood is similar. Like The Giver, it depicts a society very different from our own (or is it?), but while the first book is a kind of dystopian story, this one is more of a post-apocalyptic tale. I hope Lowry doesn't mind that I pigeonhole her novels this way.

Kira, the protagonist of the book, has just bid farewell to her mother, who died of a mysterious illness. Now an orphan, and with a crippled leg that makes her essentially useless in her primitive society, Kira is in danger of being cast out and left for dead. But when she is put on trial before the Council of Guardians, she learns that they have other plans for her. Plans that make use of her remarkable talent for working with thread. Life seems secure from her now, but, as she soon learns, things aren't as good as they seem.

That's the basic idea, anyway. It's a pretty interesting book. Lowry has set up an intriguing, far-from-perfect society with a strange set of mannerisms. Children are routinely called "tykes," husbands "hubbies." And the only indication of a person's age is how many syllables there are in his or her name. Overall, it's perhaps not as interesting as the society in The Giver, but it's still pretty creative.

The ending, I have to say, leaves something to be desired. Many things are solved, many secrets revealed, but still the ending is somehow not completely satisfying. I suppose one reason for this is that at this point Lowry knew she would be writing a third book to tie the other two together. But the book should also be able to stand on its own. For the most part it does, I guess, but some things still leave me wondering. Is it just a trick to get me to read the third book?

The thing is that I probably will.