Gathering Blue

Locations
Call Number: Y BOCD Fiction / Lowry, Lois
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Kids 4-week checkout	Y BOCD Fiction / Lowry, Lois	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Unabridged.
Compact discs.
Read by Katherine Borowitz.
Lame and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed from her squalid village to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Gathering Blue submitted by SBNB on July 2, 2014, 9:19pm Great book! Maybe not quite as good as The Giver, but it's close!

Mesmerizing submitted by mjanen on August 12, 2014, 9:29pm Loved this book. Lowry is a favorite author and this story is one of the best. Somewhat dystopian, but not a Hunger Games type story, inventive and thoughtful.

telling the future submitted by camelsamba on August 31, 2016, 8:52pm Gathering Blue is set in the future after some catastrophic event. At the beginning of the audiobook, Lois Lowry explains that she imagined the society in Gathering Blue as an alternative to the rigid structure she created in The Giver. Gathering Blue instead relies on a society that is brutish and mean. (I wish I could quote her exact words but I had to return the audiobook.)

But yet despite the harshness of the society, they do value certain artistic skills. Kira, the protagonist, was born with a disfigured leg and normally would have been cast aside by the society, but her mother protected her as an infant. Her mother's role in the society is to dye threads and patch a ceremonial robe. Her mother dies at the beginning of the tale, and a powerful leader (one of the "guardians") defends Kira against those who would turn her out because of her disabilities. The leaders have recognized that she is a gifted needleworker (embroidery, although it is never called that).

Kira is moved to a protected and pampered residence - along with a boy artist (Thomas) who carves the ceremonial staff, and a very young girl (Jo) who is being groomed for the role of ceremonial singer. They are told they will add to the ceremonial elements, that they will "tell the future": but will they be free to tell the future they envision, or will it be dictated by the leaders? Undercurrents sprinkled in the book made us wonder. But in that introduction, Lowry tells us that Kira chooses to define a new future, a different future: but we do not learn what that is going to be. For that, I gather, we must read the rest of The Giver Quartet.