Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Absorbing, Finally Disappointing Look at the YA Artist Kira has just completed the four-day wake in the Field of Leaving to help her mother's spirit leave the world. Because her mother died of sickness, their 'cott' was burnt down. Thus, because Kira's father died hunting before she was born, Kira is now a homeless orphan. And because she was born with a twisted leg and she's only an adolescent, she'll be hard-pressed to survive in her primitive-medieval post-apocalypse village. Indeed, a group of women led by the scarred and scary Vandara wants Kira's land, and when the girl protests, she's nearly stoned. (The women believe Kira should have been exposed at birth as a cripple.) Kira saves herself by invoking the right to have the dispute settled by the Council of Guardians. Having plans for her uncanny skill at combining colored threads into designs, the Guardians decide to move Kira into their Council Edifice. . . Lois Lowry's young adult novel Gathering Blue (2000) is the second book in her Giver Quartet, the first being her Newbery-winning The Giver (1993). The Giver is a high-tech dystopia in which the people living in the community have traded away differences, history, and deep emotions for homogeneity, peace, and safety. Because The Giver is so affecting, when I started Gathering Blue I was surprised by its seeming lack of connection to its predecessor. They share no characters, and their settings differ, for Kira's post-apocalypse society is centered on remembering rather than forgetting the terrible past and is low tech--there's no plumbing outside the Council Edifice and the mostly illiterate people live a hand to mouth existence based on female agriculture and male spear hunting. Nevertheless, both books make a set because they feature young protagonists whose special gifts destine them for special roles in their societies and because their societies are dystopias that repress or control their people through systematic ignorance or false beliefs. Kira's life takes an unexpected turn when she starts living in the Council Edifice. She finds a friend in a boy about her age called Thomas who is a gifted wood carver. She learns from a wonderful old woman to make dyes from plants and flowers--all colors but blue, for her village lacks the necessary woad. She gets her first job, repairing the Singer's robe, which is embroidered with scenes from the violent history of humanity culminating in the fiery Ruin that destroyed civilization and left scattered settlements. The novel explores the roles of the artist in entertaining people, maintaining traditions, and creating the future, sometimes as those roles conflict with the need for the artist to express his/her own personal creativity. Lowry's writing is limpid and concise. She depicts believable and sympathetic young characters. Kira is brave, bright, and sensitive, and inspiring when she remembers her mother's loving advice: 'Take pride in your pain. You are stronger than those who have none.' Kira's best friend Matt is an 8-9 year old dirty, lousy, cocky, funny poor boy with an abusive mother and a spicy dialect (gifty, pocky, horrid far, etc.). Lowry fleshes out her post-apocalypse world via language ('cotts' are huts, 'tykes' kids, 'hubbys' husbands, and 'artist' is an unused word), names (infants have one-syllable names, post-pubescents like Kira two-syllable ones, adults three, and old people four), and irony (the villagers don't know that the Council Edifice is a former church or that Bogota and Baltimore are names of pre-Ruin cities). I think, however, that Lowry writes more believable main characters than completely convincing future societies. In The Giver, although the transmission by touch of memories from the Giver to the Receiver is vivid and affecting, she doesn't explain the technology behind removing historical memories from the people and placing them all in the Giver/Receiver pair. In Gathering Blue, life in Kira's post-apocalypse village feels real, but Lowry never explains the hot running water in the Council Edifice or the policy to prevent villagers from learning the truth about the terrible beasts in the woods or the nature of Kira's ability to receive messages from her thread designs. Lowry avoids some typical YA story developments. No romantic triangles! And no violent action scenes, unlike, say, The Hunger Games (Kira is no Katniss), or even The Giver movie (which features an absurd chase scene near the climax). And she likes ambiguous, thought-provoking endings. The perfect ending of The Giver leaves open whether Jonas and the baby Gabriel he escapes with from his community die of cold and hunger or find a better place to live. But--for this reader--in Gathering Blue she leaves too much unresolved, unlikely, and unlikeable. Kira finally makes a choice I can respect, but given the circumstances not one I can believe that she'd be saintly enough to make or that would turn out well, despite some hopeful shoots of woad. The reader of the audiobook, Catherine Borowitz, enhances the story in all the right ways with her compassionate and clear voice. People who like The Giver should like Gathering Blue, but although it has more humor and is more poignant than its more famous predecessor, it's also less perfect and thought-provoking. View all my reviews
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