Once a year this community has a Gathering, where the community’s official Singer performs the oral history of the world as these people know it. There is a trial to determine what will become of Kira, and she ends up being chosen to be the Threader, the person in the community who restores the robe worn by the Singer when he sings the Ruin Song at the annual Gathering. After this, Kira returns back to the village where several of the women unite to demand that Kira be sent away to the fields to die since she has a bad leg and is therefore not of use to the rest of the village. When our protagonist, Kira, loses her mother, their home is burned while she is off doing the ritual four days of mourning, because there was concern that her mother may have had an infectious disease. Parents are mean to their children with impunity. In Gathering Blue, imperfections are very much frowned upon, and people who have birth defects, or who are deemed to be undesirable for one reason or another are sent out to the fields and left to die. There are also tons of rules, but the rules are much different from those in The Giver. In the world of Gathering Blue, there are tons of emotions. Gathering Blue introduces us to a dystopia that’s much different from that shown in The Giver. The main reason why I’m mentioning it now is that I read Gathering Blue while I was in Florida and on the plane back home, and I was so involved in this book that I barely even napped, which is my second favorite plane activity.

I’ve been over this with you guys before. My favorite thing about vacations and plane travel will probably always be the opportunity for uninterrupted reading.

I fully expected to get back to these books sooner than I actually did (not a surprise), but I’m glad that I finally got back to them. I remember feeling that The Giver ended abruptly, and I was hoping that the three additional novels in the “quartet” would add some depth and breadth to Lowry’s world. He ends up running away, with a baby his family has been caring for, at the end of the novel. In so doing, he learns that there just might be a better way to live than the way things are in his community. For those of you who don’t remember, The Giver is a dystopian young adult novel in which a twelve year old named Jonas is chosen to be the receiver of all the prior knowledge of his community. Remember like a year ago when I read The Giver? Yeah, I thought not.

Gathering blue graphic novel