Gathering Blue

Science fiction

First published: 2000
Print length: 241 pagesHoughton Mifflin, 2012

Description

After her mother dies, Kira faces a council trial that may expel her from a village where disabled and vulnerable people are abandoned to deadly dangers. Her deformed leg marks her as disposable, but her exceptional embroidery earns her a place repairing the Singer’s ceremonial robe. Under instruction in dyeing thread, she can create every color except blue, whose absence points toward knowledge beyond the village. Friendships with fellow orphans Matt and Thomas, and the discovery of the confined young singer Jo, deepen Kira’s doubts about the council’s authority and its stories about the Beasts. Set in the future world of The Giver, the novel explores art, social control, disability, and the difficult uses of truth.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Earnest · Hopeful · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Mystery · World

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityFriendshipInequalityKnowledge and truthOppressionPower

About Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry is an American writer for children and young adults whose fiction gives difficult moral questions clear, accessible narrative shapes. Her prose is usually direct and spare, and she often limits knowledge to a young protagonist, letting danger or injustice emerge through partial understanding. In The Giver, Jonas’s orderly community is disclosed rule by rule before transferred memories reveal what its stability has erased. That gradual widening of perception is characteristic of Lowry’s method. Ordinary routines become the means of exposing systems that control history, feeling, bodies, or belonging. Number the Stars brings the same restraint to occupied Copenhagen, keeping close to a ten-year-old who grasps the adults’ rescue work only in pieces as she is drawn into it. Lowry also writes intimate family realism. A Summer to Die uses Meg’s conversational first-person account to follow jealousy and affection as her sister’s illness alters domestic life. Whether working in dystopia, historical fiction, or family narrative, Lowry builds plots around young people learning how much their communities have concealed and deciding what responsibility that knowledge creates.

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Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Language: English
ISBN: 9780547904146, 9780547995687

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